Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  This morning I woke up in another part of my brain. Take the idea, for a moment, that one usually wakes up in a similar area of the brain every day of one’s life. When I opened my eyes, I woke with a feeling of confusion and a sense that something indiscernible had shifted during the sleeping hours and now I was somewhere else, not in another place physically, but something similar. The “I” of my self had crawled through the thickness of memory and consciousness to some other place in the structure of the brain and emerged within a new gray coil. When my eyes opened, I felt I was viewing the once familiar room through a four-foot-thick piece of slightly yellowed glass. It was like being under the surface of a pond and opening one’s eyes and straining to see a measure of distance to the kicking legs of one’s swimming partner, only there was no one else with which to measure the dislocation. I fought the urge to lay down and return to sleep in order to regain my proper place, to shift back into a developing place where for thirty-odd years I’d been waking up. I’ve been moving around through the day trying to readjust within a mild sense of panic. I kept getting lost in the notion that the drift of my past and the sway of familiarity might be just a centimeter away. But in the brain, a mere centimeter can mean hundreds of miles of cranial distance. It can mean years and years, or even a whole lifetime of familiarity being dismantled by a shift within a limited physical space.

  Two fragments of dreaming I can recall from this sleep: I was suffocating, walking through doorways or in the street just having exited from a building. There were people walking around and I felt the presence of someone I knew just over my shoulder. I felt a panic from being unable to breathe, but I couldn’t speak to anyone. Finally I managed to holler and it caused my breathing to resume and the dream shifted.… I was in a bathroom standing in front of a mirror hanging over a sink. I saw my eyes in close-up magnification. I saw dull brownish yellow marks on the whites of my eyes like they were bruised or rotting from the inside out.

  I feel a vague nausea stroking and tapping the lining of my stomach. The hand holding the burning cigarette travels sideways like a storm cloud drifting over the open desert. How far can I reach? I’m in a car traveling the folds of the southwest region of the country and the road is steadying out and becoming flat and giving off an energy like a vortex leading into the horizon line. I’m getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom. It’s the preferable sensation of arriving at a movie fifteen minutes late and departing twenty minutes later and retrieving an echo of real life as opposed to a tar pit sensation. Destination is an entry point for the practitioners of the fake moral screens.

  Forty miles outside of town, drifting through a section of countryside controlled by the marine corps air station, I’m beginning to experience the slow withdrawal from population. My body is going through slender jitters inside all the space outside the enclosed windows of the car and I feel something concrete slipping off a ledge back there behind my eyes. I was up until this moment a member of the industrialized tribe—the illusory tribe that catapults this nation, this society, into something thick and hallucinogenic. The hand with the cigarette is slowly making its way back across the hip of the horizon. Its slow-motion drift creates a dark spot below it like a cloud shadow on the landscape that travels at the same speed. The hand with the cigarette is drifting for hours back to my waiting lips. What is it in these wrists that grab the steering wheel? What blood flows through these arms and hands? What color and sensibility in that blood? What textures and images are coded and locked into those genes, those cells, those bones that drag the world toward my eyes? What do these eyes have. to do with surveillance cameras? What do the veins running through my wrists have in common with electric wiring? I’m the robotic kid with caucasian kid programming trying to short-circuit the sensory disks. I’m the robotic kid looking through digital eyes past the windshield into the preinvented world. I’m the robotic kid gone haywire in the sudden mounds and coils of krazy-kat landscapes. I’m the robotic kid lost for a fraction of evolutionary time in the outskirts of tribal boundaries; I’ve slipped through the keyhole of an enormous psychic erector set of a child civilization. I’m the robotic kid lost from the blind eye of government and wandering the edges of a computerized landscape; all civilization is turning like one huge gear in my forehead. I’m seeing my hands and feet grow thousands of miles long and millions of years old and I’m experiencing the exertion it takes to move these programmed limbs. I’m the robotic kid, the human motor-works, and surveying the scene before me I wonder: What can these feet level? What can these feet pound and flatten? What can these hands raise?

  BEING QUEER IN AMERICA

  A Journal of Disintegration

  one. I’m walking through these hallways where the windows break apart a slow dying sky and a quiet wind follows the heels of the kid as he suddenly steps through a door frame ten rooms down. A quiet and simple grace in his arms and legs as the doorways fold out to produce more doorways and it’s all some barbershop vision of mirrors with the wall ending at the distance of sky: small sparks of airplanes in that late blue and yellow and these little black pills stirring like small bees in my belly. The kid passed me earlier in the street about a mile away by the black shiny fence of a church: wrought-iron spikes topped with deadly blades part zulu. But now it’s just the sun piercing the waters of a viridian sea; his eyes set in the pale white face, arms a pale shade of red—something monkey, something borneo. His eyes make him look like he’s starving for food or just feeling lust or else he’s got the look of one of those spiritual types that hover on street corners trying to waylay and sweet-talk some passive kid into a lifetime of psychic control.

  If viewed from miles above, this place would just appear to be a small boxlike structure like thousands of others set down along the lines of the rivers in the world; the only difference being that in this one the face of the kid starts moving up the wall past a window framing the perfect hazy coastline with teeth of red factories and an incidental gas tank explosion which sends flowers of black smoke reeling up into the dusk. I could feel his lips against mine from across the room, tasting reefer or milk on them as he disappears through a square hole in the ceiling. I watch as his legs and feet leave the rungs of the metal ladder following his hips through that dark space, the soles of his sneakers floating effortlessly in the opening for a second, then shifting out of view. I followed his motions pulling myself up two rungs at a time and as my head cleared the ceiling I saw him recede farther back in the attic crawlspace. The horizontal red lines of his shirt become dark and indistinct, just the pale rose of his arms still luminous. He turned and leaned up against the wall at a point where a crack in the roof let light pass through illuminating the wall and his head like some old russian icon of a saint in mausoleum darkness. Like him I had to crouch in order to move through the narrow space, walking along the tops of spaced beams like a horizontal ladder so as not to tip and crash through the rotting tin ceiling. I bumped my head a couple of times on unseen pipes and finally reached him. His hands slid from his pockets and over the front of my trousers moving back and forth until there was swelling. My hands drifted over and repeated the actions over his crotch and like water falls from the sky I leaned in close and slid down and unsnapped his jeans button by button using only my teeth. He was wearing no underwear and I peeled back the flaps of his trousers, his dick falling neatly out to rest on my lips. It was uncircumcised, slim and warm. I passed my face underneath it, wetting it slightly, teasingly, finally taking it into my mouth and sliding my hands upward beneath his shirt; the lines of it rippling like water and I felt the downy sensation of hair beneath my palms. His chest was hard: rippling stomach, the curve of it in dim light, the brown heat of his belly against my forehead. His hands slipped softly down my collar and kneaded the mu
scles of my back, my neck and finally he made a rushing sound with his breath and he came. I could feel it jetting in warm streams hitting the back of my throat: warm liquid sensation. Felt good. Nothing but the energy in his hands speaking with me.

  two. So I’m watching this thing move around in my environment, among friends and strangers: something invisible and abstract and scary; some connect-the-dots version of hell only it’s not as simple as hell. It’s got no shape yet or else maybe I’m just blind to it or we’re just blind to it or else it is just invisible until all the dots are connected. Draw a line from here to there to there to here with all the dots being people you see from miles up in the air or from the ledge of a tall building or the window of a small plane but it’s still not that easy, not that abstract because you can’t shut out the smell of rotting. You can’t shut out the sound of it: the sound of the man standing on the sidewalk trying to scream that he’s going to throw himself in front of the passing automobiles because he wants to stop that slowly drawn line approaching him from the distance with all the undeniability of a slow train carrying sixteen tons of pressure; with all the measure and intent of crushing him but the guy is too weak to even get this amount of control over his life, he can’t even throw a fit the proper way. You can’t shut out the sights and sounds of death, the people waking up with the diseases of small birds or mammals; the people whose faces are entirely black with cancer eating health salads in the lonely seats of restaurants. Those images hurl themselves from the corners of a fast-paced city and you can’t even imagine death properly enough to tell this guy you understand what he’s railing against. I mean, hell, on the first day that he found out he had this certain virus he bent down to pick up a letter addressed to him that had fallen from the mailbox and he turned and said, “Even something so simple as getting a letter in the mail has an entirely different meaning.”

  three. I walked for hours through the streets after he died, through the gathering darkness and traffic, down into the dying section of town where bodies litter the curbsides and dogs tear apart the stinking garbage by the doorways. There was a green swell to the clouds above the buildings like a green metal retrieved from the river years ago and notions of time were retracting and extending and somewhere in the midst of this I had to take a piss. I kicked around an alleyway among the piles of dead rotting fish, buzzing flies, piles of clothing and fluttering newspapers of the past with photographs of presidents and their waving wives haloed in camera flashes and suddenly in the stench and piling of decaying fish I realized I was staring at a human hand, with the fat pale shape and color of a cherub’s hand. It stirred to life and where previously there had been discarded men’s suits and playing cards, a fat white man naked down to his waist suddenly materialized and sat up angrily. He had an enormous, pale belly on which was incised a terrible wound from which small white worms tumbled as he gesticulated like a marionette, shrieking, “DO YOU HAVE PERMISSION FROM THE OWNER OF THE ALLEY TO BE HERE?”

  I turned and left, walking back into the gray haze of traffic and exhaust, past a skinny prostitute doing the junkie walk bent over at the waist with knuckles dragging the sidewalk. She had some kind of disease on her legs: large bloodless wounds which she attempted to disguise with makeup. Whenever she heard the sound of a car slowing down near the curb, thinking it was a potential customer, she would painfully lift her body up to reveal a delirious smile and dead eyes and a weak flailing of her arms as a sign of greeting. Kids ran back and forth on the sidewalk dragging a small kitten by a rope and a bunch of winos descended like buzzards onto the waves of cars stopped at the nearest traffic light.

  My arms sometimes feel twelve feet long and I get consumed by the emptiness and void surrounding and lying beneath each and every action I witness of others and myself. Each little gesture in the movements of the planet in its canyons and arroyos, in its suburbs and cities, in the motions of wind and light, each little action continuing, helping to continue the slow death of ourselves, the slow motion approach of the unveiling of our order and disorder in its ultimate climax beginning with a spark so subtle and beautiful that to trust it is to trust our own stupidity; it sparks in the inversion of wind and then flowers out momentarily in black petals of smoke and light and then extends vertically in an enlargement of a minute vision. In the very center, if one could withstand the light, it would appear to be octopal in its appendages. Wormlike tentacles thousands of feet long vibrate stroboscopically in the bluish mist that exudes from its center. The center is something outside of what we know as visual, more a sensation: a huge fat clockwork of civilizations; the whole onward crush of the world as we know it; all the walking swastikas yap-yapping cartoon video death language; a malfunctioning cannonball filled with bone and gristle and gearwheels and knives and bullets and animals rotting with skeletal remains and pistons and smokestacks pump-pumping cinders and lightning and shreds of flesh, spewing language and motions and shit and entrails in its wake. It’s all swirling in every direction simultaneously so that it’s neither going forward nor backward, not from side to side, embracing stasis beyond the ordinary sense of stillness one witnesses in death, in a decaying corpse that lasts millions of years in comparison to the sense of time this thing operates within. This is the vision I see beneath the tiniest gesture of wiping one’s lips after a meal or observing a traffic light.

  four. I went up to see him in the hospital, it’s all septic green or pale brown and yellow, hazes of light filtering in the windows, drenching the day’s new flowers with color. There he is propped up in the white sheets with all the inventions of his day leading in and out of his body in the form of tubes and generators and pumps and dials and hisses and his eyes are bare slits with pearly surfaces glimmering inside them like somehow they’ve stopped reflecting light. Today, as yesterday, his nose is no longer the first thing I see—it’s covered in the gray and white color of cancer and it looks bulbous and he said weeks ago when he was out visiting his family in the country for the last time that the little kids playing in the park thought he had the job of a clown somewhere and how he pretended he did—and, today, as yesterday, I am amazed at the fine color of his face and how as he slips closer to death his body looks more healthy. I thought of how he’d expected at least another year but in the last two days he has died twice and now he is taking his time before the third time which would be the final time. At least the doctors had finally agreed to stop jumping up and down on him if he died again and somehow through all of this I realized how much more afraid of death they were than he.

  five. man on second avenue at 2:00 A.M. (N.Y.C.): “This guy I know was walking with a friend of his around West Street. They had gone into one of the bars and had a beer and after they left they were walking down the street when this car from Jersey cruised by … kids come around all the time throwin’ bottles and screamin’ ‘QUEER!’ and then taking off—so this car cruised by them real slow and some kid leans out the window sayin’, ‘Suck my dick!’ and my friend flipped him the finger and said something; all of a sudden the car slams on the brakes and five kids come piling outta the doors and start kicking the shit out of my friend … for the next ten minutes about a hundred guys came outta the bars and from around the corner and surrounded these five kids beating the shit outta my friend—his friend took off right away and later my friend found out that he’d just run home, didn’t bother calling the cops or nothing … and all these guys crowding around watching five guys beat up one guy and none of them said or did a fuckin’ thing … my friend said the five kids stomped on his head and chest and broke a lot of his ribs and stomped on his legs … at one point he could hardly feel them hitting him—they were jumping up and down on his head and arms and legs and finally he said he remembers jumping up and plowing through the crowd and running … his face was just a puddle of blood … the kids chased after him but he ran faster and faster and through the streets and outta the neighborhood and he kept running till he collapsed somewhere on some side street … later he woke
up in the hospital and found out that he had been unconscious for about six days … the doctors told him that he was found by the cops unconscious on West Street surrounded by a bunch of guys who didn’t do nothing; apparently he had hallucinated the whole thing of getting up and running away … he had never gotten up … the kids from Jersey got away before the cops even got there.…”