Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  six. In the skid-row section of town, the only movement in the streets was the automobiles cruising along the curbside and river parking lot. In the dusk they were like aquariums on wheels: amphibious stares of strangers pressed behind glass. Tall granite buildings with tiny windows speckled with fluorescent lights; gray vague shapes in the dripping alleyways and shit and garbage rattling in the wind along the flooded gutters, splashes of red and green neon sliding across the wet pavements. A skinny bum with red bare feet—once somebody’s little baby—crawled into a box that once contained a refrigerator nestled in the weeds of an empty parking lot. A small black dog hurtles through the wet evening air amid a squeal of tires and thumping of glass and all civilization is at the wheel.

  I pushed through the heavy glass doors and entered the place as a thin pale teenager seated at the elevated desk was yelling at the men in the back to put quarters into the machines or leave. I gave him a couple of dollars and he pumped out eight quarters from a chrome gadget on the desk. I passed through a room of enormous rubber dicks and fuck magazines and entered a moist and dark hallway. A couple of black drag queens with too much lipstick hovered in the shadows of a malfuntioning pinball machine, its flippers clacking and thrumming endlessly while the score-board revolved and whirred. A fat man with skin the color of liver sat in a booth with the door open, his mouth gaping and his tiny, perfect white hands fluttering around his open zipper.

  He was the kind of guy I’d rob banks for, leaning against a stone wall, everyone else in the crowded street disappeared. He leaned in front of me rubbed my chest and belly like he’d known me for years—some distant relative—and I left reason behind in one of those moments where all sense of living takes a slow quiet dive into mystery and possibilities. I needed to be shook. I’d forgotten who I was and anything was welcome including the rough tight line of his neck turning in a warm shirt collar. He gave a drunken half smile and stepped inside the alleyway and began climbing the fifteen-foot-high mountain of spare tires. This was next to some gas station. I was fifteen and hungry.

  I saw a guy in an old black leather jacket and a fishing cap half standing in the doorway of an open booth. The orange interior walls were illuminated by the metallic blue of a video monitor; over his shoulder, a sadist on a motorcycle was shoving his boots into the belly of an obviously drugged adolescent who lay naked on the gravel road. Halfway up the right wall of the booth was a large dick pushed through a hole, suspended and throbbing; it looked like it’d been hung up there like an unwanted gift.

  I got to the top of the mountain, both of us in the cool evening wind, each footstep more like a bounce on top of all that rubber. Sounds of faraway voices and traffic circling into the alley, his cold hands started with my shirt buttons, my tongue starting with his neck and then sliding up to his mouth. Next to his left ear an enormous and luminous white ship plowed through the waters of the river.

  A couple of quarters fished from his pockets turned on the video monitor and he flicked the stations until there was a blue image of a man’s head floating across the screen. It was a forest at night and the video was badly transferred so that everything in it was translated into different shades of cobalt. An overly sensitive microphone was being used so the entire soundtrack was crickets. A blue cowboy removing his blue plaid shirt with muscled blue arms, leaning down in a blue naked haze to lick the belly of a blue shirtless bunkmate. Crickets. A close-up of an amazing blue eye floating in a blue field cut to a blue tongue coasting along the endless surface of rough blue flesh. Crickets. Blue trees at night with a luminous blue haze of light casting about their leaves. Crickets. A blue dick floating across dark blue shadows and burying itself into a waiting blue mouth. Crickets.

  The sound of car wheels sluicing through puddles on the highway: Ah man he says as he is lowering himself onto my back one of his arms muscled and furry wrapping itself under my jaw and against the side of my face yer my babe ohh yer my babe whispering in my ear lips brushing lightly each sound a warm burst of breath ah man … yer my babe with that roping-the-steer cowboy voice I can hear the distances in that voice and smell the gathering sweat on the surface of the tires yer my babe ahh and I’m already falling cowboy-off-the-cliff-like and he’s moving his warm belly sliding it against my back taking the nape of my neck in his cold white teeth and turning my head slightly opening my eyes without my glasses and through the luminous blaze of sudden sunlight fall these shadows—the outline of thousands of leaves connected to branches that dip and bend in the wind.

  A pair of empty cowboy boots sailing slow motion across dark blue space and bouncing lazily against a bunk-house wall and then settling slowly into a series of geometric blue shadows. Crickets. Blue cowboy bodies amputating from blue darkness into the pale light. Crickets. Light blue semen uncoiling across a blue torso in some small fever.

  seven. He’s got me down on my knees and I can’t even focus on anything I have no time to understand the position of my body or the direction of my face I see a pair of legs in rough corduroy and the color of the pants are brown and surrounded by darkness and there’s a sense of other people there and yet I can’t hear them breathe or hear their feet or anything and his hand suddenly comes up against the back of my head and he’s got his fingers locked in my hair and he’s shoving my face forward and twisting my head almost gently but very violent in that gentleness and I got only half a breath in my lungs the smell of piss on the floorboards and this fleshy bulge in his pants getting harder and harder as my face is forced against the front of his pants the zipper tears my lips I feel them getting bruised and all the while he’s stroking my face and tightening his fingers around the locks of my hair and I can’t focus my eyes my head being pushed and pulled and twisted and caressed and it’s as if I have no hands I know I got hands I had hands a half hour ago I remember lighting a cigarette with them lighting a match and I remember how warm the flame was when I lifted it toward my face and my knees are hurting from the floor it’s a stone floor and my knees are hurting ’cause they banged on the floor when he dragged me down the cellar stairs I remember a door in the darkness and the breath of a dog his dog as it licked my hands when I reached out to stop my headlong descent its tongue licking out at my fingers and my face slams down and there’s this electric blam inside my head and it’s as if my eyes suddenly opened on the large sun and then went black with the switch thrown down and I’m shocked and embarrassed and his arms swing down he’s lifting me up saying, lookin’ for me?, and he buries his face in my neck and I feel the saliva running down into the curve of my neck and my arms are hanging loose and I can see a ceiling and a dim bulb tossing back and forth and suddenly I’m on my knees again and my face is getting mashed into his belly and sliding down across rough cloth and zippers and there’s this sweet musty smell and his dick is slapping across my eyes and rubbing over my cheeks and bloody lips and suddenly it’s inside my mouth and the hands twisted up in my hair and cradling my skull shove me forward and I feel his dick hit the back of my throat and I feel pain for the first time like the open pants are in focus and he’s pulled his dick out of my mouth and I’m choking and he’s running one hand over my face putting his fingers in my ears in my mouth dragging down my lower jaw and forcing his dick in between the fingers and the saliva and blood and shoving shoving in and out and pulling on my hair and everything goes out of focus my eyes moving around blindly the smell of basement water and sewage and mustiness and dirt and he’s slapping my face like he wants to wake me up and I realize I’m crying and he tells me that he loves me and he lifts me up and puts his lips over mine and sticks his tongue in my mouth and buries his rough face down in my collar and licks and drags his tongue over my shoulder and neck and his hands are up inside my shirt and he’s rubbing them back and forth across my belly and sides taking quick handfuls of flesh and twisting and rubbing and then they’re inside my pants and he suddenly rips apart the opening of my pants I hear metal buttons hitting the floor and he punches me in the side of the head at t
he same time pulling my hair and pulling me back down to the floor and I’m on my belly I feel cold rough stone scratching my skin and he kneels down suddenly into the center of my back and it hurts and I try to yell but he’s shoving my underwear into my mouth and I’m suddenly hit with such a feeling of intense claustrophobia and fear that it’s hours before I realize that my hands and legs are tied together and that I’m lying on my side and the rag in my mouth is soaking wet and making small bubbling sounds each time I breathe.

  eight. I saw her in mexico city after a day of walking around the outskirts of the upper-class zone of the city. A year after the big earthquake the buildings are still tumbling, great heaving cracks in their facades, thirty floors of vacant offices, burst windows, potted plastic palms and calendars flapping above dead machines. I saw her after a day filled with rich people and poor people; a day of diamond rings on lifeless fingers; a day of armless and legless men in the dawn (I saw the missing limbs for a fraction of a moment, suspended against the blue exhaust clouds of the city streets).

  I saw her. She’s about eight feet tall and she has the twin feet of an enormous eagle and both her arms are large serpent’s heads with tongues tasting the wind and her head, they told me, had been cut off by her brother somewhere in the skies years ago in some struggle for power and now she carries her dry skull in the center of her massive belly and where her head had been were now two large serpents symbolizing the flowing of blood and around her hips she wore a skirt made entirely of snakes, dozens of them. Around her shoulders she wore a necklace of rope that was strung with human hearts and human hands and they told me she was the goddess of the earth and they told me she was the goddess of life and death and I was amazed at how seductive she was.

  nine. Sometimes it’s like long ago when words were slow and we were meeting beneath faraway rivers. How slowly the water shifts, how slow these stones assuming the shapes of walls and roadways, lockups and borders. When they invented the car they invented the collision and the darkness of what time leads the willing body into. It’s seeing how slowly we shift position from room to room; seeing how sleep has quietly become an extension of the day; how if we take the more horrifying aspects of the world and fuse them to the unspeaking and unmoving stone lips of religious icons surely huge sections of the population will kneel before them in reverence.

  Sometimes I get seized by a discrete sensation, something like a small madness where the senses reel behind the eyes. In the midst of crowds or in immense landscapes where the sense of sky is almost deafening, great big cracks in the earth like dusty photographs of lightning. I carry silence like a blood-filled egg, ready to drop it into someone’s hands. When I was small and it would rain I thought it rained all over the world but now I don’t think so. Riding out here over the dirt roads, the day opened up like a kid falling into sunlight; sprawling out on a green lawn tasting milk on his lips. Right this minute I could tip right down into the deep of that canyon, jump from rock to rock effortlessly, thinking bird thoughts weightless like death. Smack my face against that tree, like the bird against the front of my car. The hot sun as my witness: blind sun, blind me, blond bones, bleeding hills—put thistles and mud on the wounds, roll in the dust like a coydog, scream into those anthills, run fast without looking, close those eyes, shut those curtains, high sun, high strung, big snakes in the road, big desert, big sky, clouds zoom by …

  ten. I walk this hallway twenty-seven times and all I can see are the cool white walls. A hand rubbing slowly across a face, but my hands are empty. Walking back and forth from room to room trailing bluish shadows I feel weak: something emotional and wild forming a crazy knot in the deep part of my stomach. On the next trip from the front of the apartment to the back, I end up in the kitchen, turn once again and suddenly sink down to the floor in a crouching position against the wall and side of the stove in a blaze of wintery sunlight. It’s blinding me as my fingers trace small circles through the hair on the sides of my temples, and I’ve had little sleep having woken up a number of times slightly shocked at the sense of another guy’s warm skin and my hands, independent of me in sleep, were tracing the lines of his arms and belly and hips and side. How the world is so much like dream sleep with my glasses hidden somewhere along the windowsill above the bed; there’s a slow stir of measured breath from next to me and through the 6:00 a.m. windowpanes I see what appears to be a dim forest of trees in the distance, leafless and shivering, but it’s just some old summer plants in a window box gone to sleep for the season. I think of these trees and how they look like the winter forests of my childhood and how they were always places of refuge: endless hours spent among them creating small myths of myself alone or living in hollowed-out trees or sleeping in nests twenty times larger than crows’ nests made of sticks instead of twigs. I realized then how I always tend to mythologize the people, things, landscapes I love, always wanting them to somehow extend forever through time and motion. It’s a similar sense I have for lovers, wanting somehow to have some degree of permanence in my contact with them but it never really goes that way. So here I am heading out into the cold winds of the canyon streets, walking down and across avenue c toward my home with the smell and taste of him wrapped around my neck and jaw like a scarf. It follows me in and out of restaurants and past cops and early morning children and past bakery windows filled with brides and grooms on rows of wedding cakes and across fields of brick and mortar. Small traces of memory fold and slip back to where he and I are sitting in his place late evening playing games of poker. I had never really played before in my life and suddenly after losing a sock and a shirt I became an expert. We’re laughing about it and I don’t stop for the smaller articles of clothing. I tell him I have to get it while I can, having won my first game and I motion toward his pants and in the evening stillness there’s a slight rustle of clothing. Coins spill freely to the ground and my hands are animated and drifting soundlessly up his calves, up his thighs and he tells me he learned this game years ago with some kid across the street after school in some town outside atlantic city. When their clothes were gone the loser had to suck the other guy’s dick, only they put saran wrap around each other’s dick after all you couldn’t possibly touch your tongue to flesh.

  … Through his memories I recall hours on end sitting in the weeds in the backyard next to the lawn chair where my uncle lay in shorts and a wedding ring, his body hardened and brown from days of skin diving in faraway oceans filled with the mysterious fish and creatures he described. I stared and stared and sometimes played with his arms for hours and I remember feeling a slight dizziness that years later I came to see first as a curse and then as a tool: a wedge that I might successfully drive between me and a world that was rapidly becoming more and more insane.

  eleven. A number of months ago I read in the newspaper that there was a supreme court ruling which states that homosexuals in america have no constitutional rights against the government’s invasion of their privacy. The paper stated that homosexuality is traditionally condemned in america and only people who are heterosexual or married or who have families can expect these constitutional rights. There were no editorials. Nothing. Just flat cold type in the morning paper informing people of this. In most areas of the u.s.a. it is possible to murder a man and when one is brought to trial one has only to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free. When I read the newspaper article I felt something stirring in my hands; I felt a sensation like seeing oneself from miles above the earth or like looking at one’s reflection in a mirror through the wrong end of a telescope. Realizing that I have nothing left to lose in my actions I let my hands become weapons, my teeth become weapons, every bone and muscle and fiber and ounce of blood become weapons, and I feel prepared for the rest of my life.

  In my dreams I crawl across freshly clipped front lawns, past statues and dogs and cars containing your guardians. I enter your houses through the smallest cracks in the bricks that keep you feeling comforta
ble and safe. I cross your living rooms and go up your staircases and into your bedrooms where you lie sleeping. I wake you up and tell you a story about when I was ten years old and walking around times square looking for the weight of some man to lie across me to replace the nonexistent hugs and kisses from my mom and dad. I got picked up by some guy who took me to a remote area of the waterfront in his car and proceeded to beat the shit out of me because he was so afraid of the impulses of heat stirring in his belly. I would have strangled him but my hands were too small to fit around his neck. I will wake you up and welcome you to your bad dream.