I met Johnny in a rock and roll bar where he was a bartender and I was a busboy. It was a club that traded on the memory of Chubby Checker and was run by the sleazy grade-B-level mafia. The creeps that counted the money also managed some of the hustler bars on eighth avenue and one or two of the drag queen bars in the times square area. For minimum wage I had to pick up bottles and puking drunks off the floor as well as unload hot merchandise from the backs of hastily driven midnight trucks. I unloaded stolen computers and various weird cargo and lived on the tips the bartenders kindly threw my way.
Johnny was a geneticist at a respected uptown laboratory. He also put out a xerox magazine called MURDER, which concerned itself solely with murder. It contained found clippings from newspapers, photographs of both real and staged murders, drawings of mayhem such as Elmer Fudd standing with a shotgun outside of a california McDonalds saying: “Where’s dat silly wabbit.” He culled most of the material from daily newspapers. When he compiled enough pages he would run them off on the hospital copy machine, putting out a couple hundred copies of the magazine. One day a security guard found him photocopying the magazine and hauled him up to the head of the lab, who told him the magazine was obscene and eventually fired him. It amazed me that this guy could walk through rooms of cages filled with mice heavily laden with intentionally introduced cancer tumors, past tables of beheaded rats, slit open and splayed out past the stench of death and the refrigerators filled with vials containing every horrendous disease, past lead boxes of highly radioactive materials—even worse was the fact that this lab, according to Johnny, obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars in AIDS research grants with no intention of using the monies for that purpose—and yet he could pale before the photocopies of news murder stories that his co-workers poured over every lunchtime while eating their sandwiches. I remember asking Johnny at the time why he made the magazine. He talked about the thin line people contain, which they can instantaneously cross to become windmills of slaughter. He talked about the hypocrisy people embody when they can step over the dying alcoholic sprawled outside their front door on their way to the newsstand where they buy a paper and become horrified at a printed photograph of a starving ethiopian. He said: “It’s the separation people feel from those who commit acts of violence or murder. The way they feel that a person who murders belongs to the other. But then a guy murders thirty people and seven million people line up to buy the book about those murders.
“Look at what we live in, the violence evident in the scores of people dying in the streets of starvation. It is the result of growing up in the techno age; people are unable to respond emotionally to reality unless it is translated through media images.”
JOURNAL EXCERPT:
Two centimeters beneath Johnny’s curiosity about murder exists one of the sweetest heterosexual guys I’ve ever come into contact with. His intelligence and his fearless: “Yes” to everything reminds me of the intense friendships I had as a kid, when you think you’ll know each other the rest of your life and there is no such thing as death or danger. The world we create in a day’s adventure exists outside the rest of the world. Or else, it seems as if the outside world participates in the adventure we’re creating with our own actions and gestures and ideas but somehow a transparent envelope of protection has opened up and we’re traveling through it and doing what we want and the world is surrounding the envelope, frozen and witnessing us for fractions of time but unable to interfere or step through the invisible walls of the envelope except to give us pizza or drive the subway train we’re on. I love feeling invisible to the world when I want to walk through it, or examine it.
Some mornings, after getting out of the club at 5:00 A.M., Johnny and I stop at the place he shares with Sylvia and maybe do some coke and then walk into alphabetland and start climbing the fire escapes of the burnt-out buildings. All the doors are blocked up with cinderblocks or are chained and bolted steel doors and the fire escapes are the only way to get inside. In the night hours it’s all drug dealers and guns in people’s faces and heads being blown to bits and a sudden hand comes up out of darkness and street movement and a gun is in your chest and, blam, down on your back, blood shooting out like ole faithful geysers and multiple slapping of feet heading away fast in all directions and cinder blocked doorways to abandoned buildings are opened up and a small hole where, walking by at night, you see somebody’s legs for a second, hanging out the hole, then sliding inside and then they’re gone or someone huddling next to a wall and a cinderblock disappears by their shoulder and a hand reaches out like Thing on Addams Family and takes your cash and hands back a small envelope of cut dope. One night, walking through there at 4:30 A.M., a little dog wearing a plaid winter overcoat and tiny plastic galoshes came running out of a hole in the wall and skittered down the street lost and frightened. But everybody and everything clears out as the sky grows light and we spend hours climbing through the burnt-out slum tenements examining the evidence of lives in the melted junk hastily left behind when sirens once wailed through the winter streets.
One weekend we did peyote and went out to spend the day in the country. For us the country is taking the tram out to roosevelt island and kicking around in the weeds and trees surrounding the abandoned insane asylum. We climbed what was left of the broken and decaying buildings, taking pictures of weird discards of civilization in the light of the chemical sunset. When it got too dark and silent we headed back to the tram and then took the subway to times square. This is where it gets really weird. Saturday night on 42nd street is a fishtank sensation of glittering streets swimming with what feels like too many people, but somehow it all fits together strangely: angry drug dealers appearing out of the soup with magnified hands blurring in front of my face and I can see each drop of sweat on this guy’s forehead even in shadows and the video trail of faces belonging to frozen ticket sellers in the dirty glass booths of moviehouse lobbies, with numbers relating to times of the slasher flicks and grade-B science fiction movies playing double bill. I see my feet and they’re rising and falling on the dark sidewalks and then the jiggling motion of orange crush sloshing around in the plastic tanks on the counter of some hot-dog joint and the wipe of a napkin over a tourist’s face, looking kind of panicked at the rollercoaster of flesh sliding by and around him, and there’s some spastic preacher screaming through a microphone plugged into a tiny screechy pig-amp and my camera comes up periodically to my eye and the whole scene is chopped down to a little rectangle and the rectangle is filled with arms and legs and shiny pieces of automobiles. The traffic is heavy and constant and there is a gray-faced pederast lurking in an entranceway to the sporting goods shop, trying to look nonchalant next to a deep-sea skin diver with a fucked-up manikin face behind the snorkel glass mask; its nose all chipped off and lips broken and the rectangle is moving and faces loom up to it ’til I just see an eyeball and there’s breaking glass and some wino is having a fit and throwing empty bottles at his demons. All the world is a sliding sensation filled with things to buy and things bought and groups of kids armed with carton cutters are spontaneously exploding away from an invisible radius spilling through the traffic and cars are screeching and bus exhaust spitting in short bursts and these kids are going to get something, what with the frightened tourist waving his hands in traffic running up the middle dotted white line—the spinal cord of every road and the rectangle comes down and I realized I was so moved by the details I forgot to take a picture; my hand feels like it is independent of me anyway. I wish I could pick up that guy’s arm and examine the elaborate tattoos on his biceps and fingers and I’m thinking of sex in the dirty sheets of the ten-dollar hotel rooms. It’s a one-way ride to my childhood and it is touched off by that group of sailors, three of them, and I never did figure what ship they got off of; it’s definitely a foreign country because nobody in america in their right mind would wear a hat like that with a dumb red pom-pom waving in the breeze and they walk through all this like an integral part of the picture. The re
ctangle is up and surrounding everything, even the spit and tin cans underfoot and the fragments of moving arms and legs and the face of a prostitute in the biggest wig I ever seen all flamed red and there’s something in her eyes: it can only be a guy with all that thick make-up and I can recognize something like anger in those eyeballs: “DON’T YOU TAKE NO PICTURE OF ME” and of course I won’t, I’m just part of the scenery drifting by through a tiny window and I see long legs and spiky boots and elegant high heels and three prostitutes suddenly surround a business man from the waldorf and they’re saying: “Come on honey” and rubbing his dick, rubbing his chest, kissing his neck leaning in front of his face murmuring sweet things and his wallet appears behind his back in the hands of one of them and they all drop away as he continues to giggle like a sex-mortified five-year-old and I remember the drugged kids I saw being sold in that subway staircase and what is all the racket? It’s an ambulance stuck in the traffic wailing away, my fucking ears hurt and the psychedelic stuttering of light bulbs surrounding doorways and peep show entrances are tapping into my spine and my belly and we’re turning a corner. I keep getting frozen fragments of faces. An eye with all the language one could hear casting over its surface and a neck I’d like to put my tongue to and I’m amazed at how many different styles of shirts and pants and jackets and coats there are in the world. A hustler nods out against a wall among the huge rush of people exiting from the three-dollar movie and he’s squeezing his dick absentmindedly and I’m taking pictures which will never come out because of the light quality and the speed of the film but the visions are so intense that ’til the day I die I will always have these photographs in my brain and suddenly a face fills the rectangle and it’s so filled with hate and larceny: “Let me hold that camera,” that somewhere in the back of my etch-a-sketch brain I realize there is danger, but the effects of the drugs make me feel that if the guy whips out a knife or throws a punch, it will take his arms an hour to travel the hundreds of miles of distance in order to connect with my belly or face. The drug-induced sensation of distance helps my body language emanate total fearlessness which no one will bother to challenge.
Through Johnny I met Dakota one evening in the club. I remember a skinny guy in a trashed out white t-shirt looking like it was awash with perspiration and floor grime, and black pants and a long turkey-like neck with a hawk head; a flesh covered skull set on top of that neck. He was variously a writer, artist, musician, scientist, and actor in super-8 films, but I felt instantly drawn and connected to him because of his physical look and energy. I always considered myself either anonymous or odd looking and there is an unspoken bond between people in the world that don’t fit in or are not attractive in the general societal sense. That’s why you have whole retirement villages in Florida filled with “freak show” castoffs. You immediately feel warmth with each other’s presence. I remember his face when I first laid eyes on him sitting on a stool at the bar; he had a las vegas cardshark’s smile that literally wrapped around his head and he wore dark highway-cop sunglasses. He was bouncing off the walls with roped-in energy.
He lived in a welfare hotel uptown that I visited once and, walking through the stinking halls, it was a shock to step inside a single room that had all the subdued air of a cathedral on a mountainside. Vague remnants of incense and various shrines to deities I wasn’t familiar with. He lent me a drawing for something I was writing about violence: image, physical, and psychic violence. It was a mandala-like drawing of a man and a woman fucking each other in a yin-yang pose; at the same time the woman was shooting the guy in the head with a revolver and the guy was stabbing the woman with a hunting knife. It was a marriage of conception and death. I wanted to place it next to a photograph that Johnny took of a lab rat, decapitated, slit open and splayed out for research. I was trying to uncover something in people’s responses to images of violence: how a drawing of violence seemed to some people to contain more of a repellent intent than a photograph of violence, possibly because the photograph suggested that the image was merely witnessed—its intent was buried in the medium.
Dakota lent me a film script he had written that took certain myths and a historical treatment of voodoo deities and created a narrative out of the information, making use of the psychological properties of light. He researched and understood the effects of light on the human eye and constructed a script that would use segments of film made at dawn and dusk as well as in brilliant ocean sunlight and the dark shadows of afternoon cities. The film promised to produce unconscious and physical sensations in the viewer while battles of power took place through the various centuries between practitioners of certain spiritual beliefs.
I remember two lamps in his room that were covered in meticulously cut out pieces of construction paper that had been previously folded in the ways we folded paper as kindergarten students to make chains of dolls. Only his dolls were intricate mandalas of spiritual figures from voodoo history, hearts and skulls, jagged frenetic energy explosions, bodies in lotus positions with enormous hard-ons, jeweled crowns, buddhas, interconnected figures, and even his own profile repeating in mirror-like smiles. He also made long cut-up prose poems using fragments of newspaper headlines and sub-headlines and pieces of type from advertisements. He was fucking with the validation implied in media. He was tugging at the trust people have for information when it is disseminated through cold type in a daily newspaper, a paper propped up by millions of advertising dollars. When you buy a newspaper you are being bought. Dakota used dime-store scissors and glue to turn the WORD in on itself like a psychic snake swallowing its own tail.
TAPE RECORDING:
DAVID: When was the first time you met Dakota and what do you remember?
JOHNNY: The first time I met him I was living with Sylvia. Nancy, who I think was our roommate, brought me over to his house on the west side, which he called the Palacial Mansion. I’d read a bunch of his cut-up pieces in one of Joe’s magazines, and I think he was going to help me with my fruit fly experiment. It was around 1979-1980.
D.: What was the experiment?
J.: It was just classic genetic stuff; growing fruit flies and—
D.: Did he help you collect? He always had that reptilian quality about him.
J.: No, man … heheheh … I don’t have clear memories of my first meeting—what I remember was that I was kind of awed by him, by his house. He had these huge windows that were covered in hundreds of xeroxes of planes crashing, one after the other filling up the entire window like a shade. The plane was a passenger airliner and it was positioned at a 45-degree angle and the light came through them at certain times of the day. He had monstrous xeroxes all over the place and a bunch of Frankenstein models with their monster hands out, all lined up in rows like they were worshipping. He had tons of small electronic machines; keyboards and synthesizers and children’s electronic musical toys.
My first impression of him physically was that he was a strange-looking guy. He used to call himself an ectomorph—he wanted to start an ectomorph club. He wanted to print up and hand out cards to people. He was very attracted to skinny people. His ribs were sticking through his skin and he had a jutting chin. He had an appearance like nobody else. I remember making a death mask of his face—he was originally going to be the devil in the film you and I were making. We had made a whole bunch of death masks of different people and death masks never usually look like the person you really are—Dakota’s mask was the only one that looked like him; you could not mistake that thing. I still have it in my house.
He made my life change. I learned so much from him spiritually—he pulled me up from the bottom of the ladder. It was the information he gave me which affected the way I think. When I first met him and hung around with him I was pretty intimidated because he was so fucking sharp; nothing slipped by him—he would turn a word you said, or something that happened; he would relate it to all these other things. There were so many connections going on in his brain that it was amazing. He could give value to expe
riences or devalue them—he could see through all the bullshit like just watching tv or dealing with newspapers; with his scissors he could take something we live with every day and turn it into something very powerful. He’d turn the mundane into something with meaning and power; into something relevant. He brought me up to a level of awareness where I could see the truth in things within the structure of the world.
JOURNAL ENTRY:
Down in the piers around sunset, gray lines of the river are easing towards the dusk. There are times I see myself from a distance entering the torn, ribbed, garage-like doors of this place from the highway—I step away from myself for a moment and watch myself climbing around and I wonder, what keeps me going? Why is it these motions continue over and over, animal sexual energy? The smell of shit and piss is overwhelming; everybody uses this place as an outdoor toilet, getting fucked in the ass and then letting it loose in some spare corner. Undershirts and socks people used to wipe their asses months ago, after sex, mix with cast-off clothes and pools of urine. To get further into the warehouse I have to breathe lightly and stay near the openings in the walls and walk quickly way back into the darkness to the farthest point, where the walls open out to the river, and a concrete platform that seems to ride the waves, every so often crumbling and sinking as if into raging seas. Deep in the back of my head I wish it would all burn down, explode in some screaming torrent of wind and flame, pier walls collapsing and hissing into the waters. It might set us free from our past histories. Once it was all beautiful rooms that permitted living films to unwind with a stationary silence that didn’t betray the punctuations of breathing, the rustle of shirts and pants sliding.
Close to the Knives Page 16
