TAPE RECORDING:
DAVID: What was the first time Dakota tried to kill himself?
JOE: It must have around ’84 or ’85. See, I hung out with Dakota just about every day for a long time. He was like my best friend. I had various girlfriends around this time and I could never understand why he hated them so much. Then I found out he was attracted to me. This was around ’84 and I was moving into a different circle. Things were changing around me. It was because I was tall and attractive and Dakota was short and ugly—let’s be blunt here—people were more willing to talk to me than they were to him. I think his suicide had a lot to do with him seeing his circle—Johnny was also very attractive; we seemed to have no trouble getting laid and Dakota did; he’d always be telling me about these weird encounters and shit. He’d always be meeting these weird guys who were all kinked out and he’d have sex with them. Anyways it seemed we were going places that seemed closed to him, and when I look back I was always asking all these people to be in films and I’d only ask him to help with them. Now why was this? I don’t know—we were moving around in all these circles and he resented the fuck out of it. He tried to kill himself. He wrote me this letter saying, “By the time you get this I will be dead. Come up to my apartment and you can have my synthesizer. I’ll leave the door unlocked and I want you to take pictures of me dead.” I got this letter on a monday morning. He’d shot ten bags of heroin. So, I called up his job and there he was at his job and I said, “Hey … this is real funny.” Stuff like that just tended to alienate me even more. It got to a point where I just wished he’d go and do it—he tried it again. I think he was reacting to seeing his support group just peel away. He did tell me a lot that he just couldn’t find anyone to be in a relationship with; just could not find anyone. When he went to texas he wrote me and told me he did find someone—he found a girl and a guy. See, I’d black all this shit out cause I wasn’t interested in it. I remember him telling me once that he met some guy who he had sex with in doorways—he’d just bump into him; no names exchanged or nothing like that. Dakota also told me, as have some other gay people, his curse was that the guys he was attracted to were straight … which … I mean … why not give yourself two headaches …
D.: … When you got that note did he really try and kill himself?
JOE: Yeah. He shot ten bags of dope but it didn’t work—he just woke up two days later.
D.: Did he explain that he was infatuated with you?
JOE: Yeah. Of course. But I blocked it out—didn’t think about it; didn’t want to think about it because then it would make me question my own self; my own closetedness … these are things we macho dudes want to keep down … you know? I have the same taste for the bizarre that anyone else does but I fight to keep it in check … y’know? ’Cause I got enough cans of worms … hahaha. You know I went through my bisexual period—that’s probably what freaked Dakota out; because I went out with some other dude. Me and this guy would start sharing these girlfriends; we’d start having these threesomes—I knew why I was doing it … because I was having doubts about what I was into. But that might’ve sent him over the edge. I also noticed that—see, we were drifting apart and this happened to me before; this just happened to me recently—this girl I was with, I told her, “I can’t see you any more”; we’d already had this agreement that we wouldn’t get serious, anyway, “I can’t see you any more.” So, “Oh, I’m pregnant.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna kill myself.”
I was entering a state of mind where I saw the outline of my life as far as the direction it was moving. I could see the outline, the content, and the back wall of it. I knew I didn’t want to touch the back wall because there was no coming back for me. I kept having the recurring sensation of standing a block away, watching this familiar but transparent version of myself pacing around in small circles next to a line of self-destruction. Every so often the figure would stop, turn to face the line and lift one foot in the air as if to step over. The foot remained in that position while I got in a car and left for a trip around the states. I met up with Johnny, Joe, and Sammy some months later in Nashville and we headed southeast through tobacco fields and southern floods, hits of acid and shopping-mall movies. One night, in some dying coastal town with a pitiful amusement park, we did some acid and walked the beach until we found a building containing a pool that glowed from underwater lights. Jumping off the diving board seated in easy chairs, we threw all the pool furniture into the water. We had a box of fireworks in the form of large gunpowder-filled Space Rockets. Down on the dark, wet sands of the beach we opened the box. We snapped the wings and air blades that determined flight direction off the sides of each rocket before lighting the fuses. What resulted at the moment of launch sometimes had us throwing ourselves to the ground covering our heads or else running towards the midnight waves with a flaming projectile close at our heels.
TAPE RECORDING:
DAVID: What happened the second time Dakota tried to kill himself?
JOE: The other time Dakota did it was really funny. It got to the point where Dakota would disappear for ages and—this is typical dopefiend activity—somebody’s ignoring you so you try to kill yourself or get into big trouble just to get their attention; ’cause that’s the only way you can get it. Its like when you’re in a relationship with your parents where they always beat you. You almost welcome the beatings because it’s a show of some kind of affection—you’ll take anything when you can’t get nothin’. The second time he tried it was really funny—he’d disappeared for days and we’d call all the people who knew him: “What happened to Dakota—oh, I hope he didn’t kill himself again. I wonder where he is?” and this would go on and on and I’d keep going to his house trying to get in and he didn’t have a phone, so you’d go out there and scream from the fuckin’ street or try and get in the building. And I went up there all the time anyway and just sat up there and smoked pot with him—it was during a period when I’d quit smack. Then this next time he just disappears for a long time and finally I find him—I seen him walking down the street—that became the only way I could contact him anyway, ’cause he wouldn’t show up at his job. I’d say, “Where you been man?” and he’d say, “Oh I just got out of the hospital. I tried to kill myself,” and I go up to his apartment and the whole place is covered with blood, man. He lived in this little room about ten by ten and one side’s all newspapers up the wall cause he saved every newspaper and the other side’s all garbage ’cause he had to save all his garbage and all these rows of bottles filled with piss—there was a bathroom right there but he had to save all this shit—and there was a whole wall of synthesizers and stuff. That was his apartment, with two windows and this little tiny, yuck, bed. He had a green shower outside in the hall—green from scum—and he was always infatuated with this suicide shit. All his poetry and shit would have stuff about suicide and “the young prince kills himself …” and all that stuff; he was really into Harry Crosby, you know—the Black Sun and all that shit. But you know, since the last way didn’t work, he decided he would cut his veins ’cause cuttin’ your wrists never works, ’cause your blood always clots up, you know. If you had seen Caligula you know you had to keep your open wound in the water to keep it from clotting—so he said that since he knew he could stick needles in his arm and it didn’t hurt he figured the best way he could do it was to cut these big hunks of his veins out up on his … what do ya call it? Triceps? Biceps? Biceps! So he cut these big hunks of his veins out with an Exacto knife. But the funny part of the story was: well, first he’d like done all this buddhist stuff—he was way into buddhism; he’d done all this alter shit and he put these two big buckets of hot water in front of the altar and then he cuts out the vein on this side and he said the blood just starts shooting all over the place—I’m rolling on the floor when he’s telling me this. He said the funniest thing was when he was trying to cut his other arm the blood from his first arm kept shooting up into his face and it took him forever to get the second
one and he runs over and sticks his elbows into the water—he puts one in each bucket to keep them from clotting—and he’s just sitting there in front of the altar like this and blood’s shootin’ everywhere, but then the water starts getting cold and he’s going: “oh fuck I’m clotting up!” and he cut these huge hunks cause he figured it’d be too big to clot up and then he goes over to this little sink and he’s trying to fill up the buckets again and take ’em back over to the altar and blood’s still shooting out everywhere. He puts the buckets down and goes: “goddamn, man I am tired …”, y’know he was starting to get all cold and dreamy and shit and he just leans against the wall there near his sink, slid down the wall and fell face forward over the bed and passed out and since he didn’t have his arms in the water, they clotted up. But he said he lost so much blood he felt this huge tourniquet was twisting around his chest; like all his vessels were collapsing and he said he’d never try it this way again, by the way. He said he was lying there passed out and he’s groaning—his body’s there passed out, totally unaware of groaning—oh oohhh. His fuckin’ neighbor heard him groaning, comes and knocks on the door, opens the door and sees him laying there and the blood everywhere and calls the cops. So then the paramedics came and got him and they said, “We can arrest you for attempted murder,” or else they were gonna put him in the psycho ward, and they sentenced him to go to the psycho ward every day and he said, “Yeah … I’ll do that, I’ll do that.” Of course he didn’t do that after the first day. And … uh … that was his second time … that was around ’85 and this was the time when we were into the bigger, the more outrageous something is, the better. And this was about as outrageous as you could get, y’know.
D.: WHAT DID YOU SAY TO HIM? HOW DID THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?
JOE: I was laughing my head off. Because I couldn’t believe it—he was laughing too. I just thought it was such an incredible story.
D.: But what did it bring up in your own head about yourself?
JOE: Nothing. But then after that point … It brought up nothing because …
D.: Were you doing dope at that point?
JOE: Yeah, yeah—I think … maybe not. But it made me want to … um … I was getting tired of it, y’know? Because it was gettin’ obvious what he was doing … um … he was fascinated with suicide …
D.: Yeah, but earlier you said he had all this desire for connection with somebody …
JOE: Yeah, but he was fascinated with anybody that killed themselves, y’know? After that second attempt he would disappear all the time and after that I just wished he would either do it or split because it was something I just didn’t want to think about. I just wanted my old friend who was into doing stuff, see—I had moved into my own things and I assumed he would move on into another direction; it’s just that when I didn’t take him along with me into my direction … I wanted to see everyone flourish but when people stopped flourishing and just got suicidal I didn’t want to see it anymore. He was shooting a lot of coke at that time.
Death was everywhere, especially in my apartment, a gentrified space right above Joe’s place. In my depression I kept thinking it was Joe’s fragmented state of mind that was pumping death vibes up through the floor. Later I found out a woman with three kids had occupied my apartment before I got there. She apparently died a slow, vicious death from AIDS. I felt like the connection between me and this circle of friends was getting buried in veils of disintegration; drug addiction creates this vortex of psychological and physical fragmentation that is impossible to spotlight or put a finger on. Joe was wrestling with it and at the same time seemed unconscious of it. I thought he was becoming a creep, sliding into a pimp mentality. Whenever I ran into him he was babbling about Charles Manson and all the girls that were throwing themselves at him in nightclubs. Johnny was getting more erratic and transparent in his addiction. I kept seeing those visions of myself, transparent with one foot lifted in the air, frozen in mid-step over the line. Everything in the environment was a huge soup of contradictory and confusing energies. Most people I knew had never been there and I couldn’t even bring it up. I couldn’t talk about it until I knew what I wanted. Having come out of a violent background as a kid, living on the streets until I almost died of malnutrition and exposure, having wrestled with thoughts of suicide because of the idea of living in a social structure that would rather I disappear or remain invisible or die, because of my sexuality and mental framework, I felt myself at a point where I needed to either define certain boundaries for myself or get away from my life as it was. The seductiveness of everything the State finds repellant or threatening to its structure always draws me back to examine it, at least until I see its shape. But how can one understand something about death unless they actually die?
Dakota was leaving town to head back to Texas. It was a murky time and I’d heard that he was completely broke and fighting withdrawals, and also there was a pall of gray from the stabbing incident surrounding him. I could feel the heaviness in him; I don’t think there was even a fragment of judgment coming from those he knew. The line was always there to cross—we recognized that. I mean we were “americans” and in america you have cardinals preaching bloodlust from the pulpit during times of war. The fake moral screens are unfurled by the State whenever they decide to send troops into another country to protect their corporate interests. You have the concentration camps set up by the State in the form of ghettos. Aside from the insane, anyone who lives in america carries a rage and an impulse to shred the screens of physicality and the fake moral codings that fence that rage in.
I saw Dakota walking down the street the day before he left town. I was in a car I owned at the time, that cost me forty bucks. I opened the passenger door and invited him in. All I remember is wanting to place my body on top of his. Instead I told him that I always felt a strong connection to him, like I’ve known him for twenty years and that I was sorry he was leaving and that we’d never had the chance to uncover the connection. I told him to take care of himself and be sure and write me from texas. I might have given him some cash. A month later I received a letter from him, but I was in the midst of a serious depression and never answered it.
TAPE RECORDING:
JOHNNY: Dakota’s and my relationship was so weird at the end, I just wanted to make it up to him and make him feel better because I had long gotten over him ripping me off for all that money. He had been out of a job and I had given him the key so he could use my phone to call around for jobs, and all this money I had, that I was spending on films, I kept in drawers and it kept disappearing little by little. I couldn’t believe it was Dakota, but he was the only person who could’ve done it, and it went on and on and I just kept thinking, “I misplaced it,” because here was this guy in that Palacial Mansion—he built a shrine over a mouse hole. He wouldn’t kill a cockroach and here he had totally turned around and was ripping me off and I just couldn’t believe that this person I was so close to and that I was spiritually connected to could be ripping off a blood brother. I set a trap and I caught him; I went down to the street and I was so pissed off I wanted to punch him. He was waiting to buy drugs with my money and I was so hurt, I was like, “Give me my money back and don’t come around me anymore.” I started to cry; I was so upset. I just never expected somebody I was so close to to do something like that. If he had just asked—I’d told him if you ever need money—I’d have given it to him. Even if it were for drugs I’d have given it to him. Even if it were for drugs I’d have given it to him or helped him to stop or something. When I first met Dakota, I asked him if he ever did dope and he said, “No. I don’t want to start ripping off my friends.” An old lover of his had ripped him off. I think he was on his way down with the whole deathtrip and stuff.
It blew me away when he stabbed someone. The reason he did that, I think, was because he was feeling intensely all his shortcomings; like the way he felt picked on, the way he’s so skinny and he couldn’t fight back, and I think this was just a statement to these
drug dealers because he said he stabbed the guy over a ten-dollar bag of pot. This guy ripped him off for pot and Dakota said he wasn’t gonna take it anymore and he said, “I’ve been pushed over the line.” He practiced with a knife on a coat that was padded and stuff to see how far he could stick it in. For two days he practiced, and then he went back to buy pot and he dressed differently so that the guy wouldn’t recognize him and he reached around behind him and stuck a knife into his kidney. He said the guy just went paralyzed, and he heard a day later that they found a body, so he assumed that he killed the guy. It all ties together: he was numbing himself with drugs and he stabbed somebody and he ripped somebody off and all that at the end, where he changed and had different values; but it all came from that powerlessness that comes from being a human being, something we all feel like when they raise taxes and the landlord raises rent and there’s nothing you can do about it and you got a baby—he just got fed up and started lashing out.
“It takes an entire village to raise one child.”—African Proverb
TAPE RECORDING:
DAVID: When was the first time you thought about killing yourself?
JOE: Me?
D.: Yeah.
JOE.: ME?
D.: Yeah. You.
JOE: Only when I was doing drugs; when I saw no other way out. Only when I did drugs … or when I was a kid. Now, when I was doing drugs I thought about it very seriously—you gotta apply this to Dakota too, because he was doing drugs and drinkin’ like a fish. And when you’re in that state everything looks totally fucking bleak all the time. When you’re caught in the maw of heroin or alcohol, in particular, you try to imagine your life going on and you can’t think of any way to stop doing whatever abuse you’re doing and it just looks like this endless progression of: I get high, I work, I get depressed, I get high, I get depressed, I get high and it looks pretty fucking bleak; and you just think: well this is pretty hard to take, why don’t I just end it now. I can only say this ’cause now I can see the way out and I can look down the road and it doesn’t look so bleak. I can totally sympathize with Dakota.
Close to the Knives Page 19
