After he did the stabbing thing I’d hooked up with Audrey and I kept telling her, “You gotta meet this guy Dakota, you gotta meet this guy, he’s so fucking nuts—he wasn’t really nuts, he was just a really nice guy and I’d been looking for him all over the fucking place and he’d disappeared again and I thought maybe he killed himself again and so I kept going up to his apartment trying to find him … I’d get up there and keep banging on the door. I was up there with Audrey and I ran into him on the street and I said, “Where you been man? I’ve been looking for you for like three fucking weeks?” He told me about stabbing that guy and he’d been hiding out—and this time he didn’t like want to shout it from the rooftops like when he tried to off himself or something. And he told me it was the first time the suicide urge ever left him was when he stabbed that guy. He said he saw that movie Network and the guy says, “I’m not gonna take it anymore, not gonna take it any more.” So he just picked out this guy, and he really researched the whole method of how to stab somebody and do the most damage and get away with it and then he carried it out.
D.: What was that method?
JOE: Well, he was always real into medical texts and all that shit and he found out the best way to get somebody was in the kidneys; y’know, instant paralysis even if you don’t kill them. And this drug dealer had ripped him off for some pot. A guy had taken Dakota’s money and sold him something and this other guy came up and said, “Hey man, he ripped you off, he ripped you off. If you give it back to me I’ll go back and make him give you the right amount. And Dakota, always wanting to be friends with whomever, finally relented and gave it to him and the guy split and never came back. So this really pissed Dakota off because he always got beat all the fucking time. So he researched it, found out the kidneys are the best place, took that switchblade I gave him and he was like practicing on his bed and his pillows and stabbing through different kinds of fabrics just to make sure he could do it. Then he went back down there at two in the morning after practicing for a couple of weeks and went up to this guy and said, “Hey man, I want you to get me some pot. Here’s twenty bucks—you can do that can’t ya?” And the guy goes, “Sure, sure, sure,” and he knew the guy was gonna try and rip him off again and he says, “Well I don’t want to pass it to you on the street here—lets walk down this side street a little bit” and Dakota says he put his arm around the guy and said, “Man, y’know you’re O.K.” and he pulled the guy towards him like in an embrace and pulled out the switchblade and just stabs him in the kidneys and just left the guy laying there and he told me all these things, like he was wearing tennis shoes and he was afraid they’d find footprints so he went all over the town and like put one tennis shoe over here and one tennis shoe over there and he buried everything—got rid of the switchblade and all that shit and … um … pretty sure the guy died because he read a thing—I saw this thing in the paper about them finding this dead junkie type in a dumpster up there. He didn’t put him in the dumpster; maybe the guy climbed in there or something. So that was the first time his obsession to kill himself ever left him. He finally felt free of all that weight; he finally stood up to it all.
JOE: He always wanted to pay back all these people he felt were oppressing him, and a drug dealer—what more perfect candidate for somebody who oppresses people. Another important thing that happened at that time was he had this crummy little apartment on 36th street and it was a corner place; a tiny fucking apartment but he had these two windows—it’s a proven fact that you need a certain amount of eye room to keep from going crazy, and from this room you could see a building on one side, a building on the other side, but right straight down the middle you could see all the way to the river. You know we all hated fucking rich people and we still do … make a little note there … and they started building this fucking condo co-op thing right on the river, right in his view and he’d sit there and say, “Look at that—that motherfucker’s gonna put it right in my fucking view and then I ain’t gonna be able to see nothing but buildings,” and that building would go up and up and up and finally it was just like a fucking door shuts, y’know? That kind of shit really affects you.
JOE: Well, after he killed somebody he seemed to be trying to get his shit together and he started talking about leaving town. Johnny can tell you all kinds of weird stories because I was losing track of him … like I was trying to break the connection. Johnny lived right down the street from him and Johnny was hanging out with him and I was breaking connection there too. It’s all fuzzy, y’know … like if Dakota was more attractive … (TAPE RUNS OUT)
… Dakota was broke and I was giving him pot to sell and he would just never have the money and he was getting way in debt and it was starting to look like a bad scene and, naturally, I would move away from that scene, I mean—who wouldn’t? But it’s funny because since I got straight I’ve been wanting to talk to people that I broke connection with because the straighter you get—like if Dakota had stayed straight—the more you realize how much you really like that person; how much you really love that person … D.: Yeah, I find that with increased mortality it shows me how much I like people—which is the exact opposite.
Peter was dying from AIDS and I was helping to take care of him with a handful of other friends of his. I barely spent time at my apartment above Joe’s place and had little contact with him or Johnny. I had been at the bedside of Keith David when he died, and watching his body grow still after the doctor removed him from the life-support system turned something around in my head. Johnny was moving around in california and for periods of time flying between the two coasts. I’d heard that at the latest count he’d died three times but was revived. One always hears that an addict of any sort has to reach bottom before they can come back swinging. I talked to him once or twice on the phone and he told me he was running packages of ecstacy from the west to the east coast. His physical condition was deteriorating; I didn’t understand why any cop in sight didn’t turn him upside down and shake the obvious drugs or money out of his pockets. He seemed to lead a charmed life, or else maybe some part of him wasn’t ready to die yet. One flight he was preparing to board in san francisco almost tripped him up. He had a pound of ecstasy in his carry-on bag and I think the X-ray technician spotted something weird. The agent reached into the bag and lifted the pound of ecstasy into the air, saying, “What’s this?” while combing through the bag with his other hand. The X-ray machine was six feet away from the door to the airport police station and cops were exiting every few seconds. The agent said, “Tell me the truth now.” Johnny told him it was ecstasy but that it was for his own consumption. The agent stood there for an extended moment and then placed it back in the bag and said, “Okay … go ahead.”
I was getting weird about all the shit in my life. I told Johnny I couldn’t hang out with him anymore because, emotionally, it was too ugly to be taking care of a guy who was battling to live and then hang out with people that were jamming shit in their arms or throwing themselves into the varied arms of death. I had previously tried to help him get off heroin by paying his way on a trip to mexico, stupidly thinking that the mere physical separation from the drug contacts would help erase his addiction. We went down south of the border to mexico city and he went through withdrawals on the train ride. The energy that came out of his brain and body for days afterwards was like some psychic kinetic hydraulicism. I saw in the air of the hotel room a transparent multi-armed creature devouring the heads of tiny humans. I gave Johnny some cash to get him to the yucatan and told him we had to separate. After he split I made friends with a taxi driver who took me through the slums on the outskirts of town, where a gas storage tank had exploded, demolishing an entire town. “Right over there on that hillside,” said the guy, “there was a horse standing there made entirely of charcoal.” The gas company had completely rebuilt the town as well as adding a new playground. Just above the playground on the hillside were two brand-new gas storage tanks. When I returned to new york city I saw Johnny abou
t two weeks later. He was in town a couple days and his eyes were heavily lidded from dope. I started avoiding him after that.
DREAM:
In this sleep I unlock the front door of an apartment and enter a small studio with one partial wall separating the windowed room from the front door and hallway. I lie down on a small white bed, suddenly wondering if I’ve locked the front door, when I hear the sound of some thing or person push open the door and enter the apartment. I turn over onto my back and stretch my head back in the direction of the dividing wall—no one there—and I feel a slight shiver of fear and get up from the bed. It is night and this isn’t my apartment. I had come through the streets of a foreign city and somebody was allowing me to stay in this studio. Tom, my boyfriend, lives downstairs, directly below, in an identical place.
Suddenly this guy rushes around the corner of the wall and pushes me backwards onto the bed. I am pushing him away with my arms but he is too strong, there’s too much weight behind his movements. His silhouette is muscular, like a weight lifter, and as light casts over him from the window I realize he is covered in Kaposi’s lesions. He is naked from the waist up and his head is shaved. He lowers himself onto me and opens his mouth in a kind of grin. His mouth looks wet. He leans close to my face to kiss me, saying, “You would have thought I was very sexy and cute if you had seen me before I got ill.” I am upset at everything that is happening but I give him a kiss because he is so sad. I feel sorry for him, briefly, but then I push him off me and rush out the door into the hall and down the staircase. I get to the door of Tom’s place and push the buzzer, wondering if it is loud and will it alert the guy upstairs as to where I am. A loud quick burst of buzzer and I push it again and again until it no longer works. I’m frightened and I start banging on the door. Tom opens it up and I’m crying, “Oh god … you won’t believe what just happened.”
Peter was dead. I felt the landscape shifting beneath my feet. I felt disoriented from lack of sleep for periods of time. When I was in the street walking, it didn’t feel like walking; it was simply the body being jerkily propelled forward on blind legs. I was preoccupied with the sense of disease and death in the environment. I was involved with a guy who I loved as far as I could ever let myself be loved, but the grainy black pall had drifted down from nowhere, without the benefit of drugs, and settled over the landscape. Nothing seemed to relieve it. I wanted to take the abstraction of death and look it in the eye and snap its weary neck. I isolated myself and spoke to hardly anyone.
Joe had sold the lease to his apartment to his landlord and left town. I got occasional cards from san francisco. It seemed every time I spoke to someone from there they were cranked up on speed. When Joe showed up for brief periods of time I ignored his messages on the phone machine until invariably he’d appear on the street as I was exiting the front door. I’d go sit and have coffee with him in a nearby restaurant. He was trying to kick heroin but seemed to be falling into amphetamine use. Maybe it was the discordant jitters he was having from being away from dope, but I remember a last meeting at a restaurant table before he split again and it was a disjointed monologue spilling out of him about his new “positivist attitude” that was changing his life around. I recall fragmented sentences and images about a motorcycle garage he lived in, or maybe it was a garage where motorcycles would appear and get chopped up and some girl was having a baby and he was running with a gang that was stealing telephone booths and everything was really fucking great and this motherfucker was trying to fuck his girlfriend and that motherfucker was saying that and he was looking for someone to do some “real jobs” with and he was going to buy guns in arizona and everything was fucking cool and in the midst of all his frenetic wordspills I felt like I could have been just a mirror above his sink at home. I felt like I didn’t exist for him even though he had searched me out to speak about all this. He also had some terrible skin ailment, that spread just by touch, which he was absentmindedly picking at.
I realized later that it didn’t matter if he did know I was there or not; it was me who was lost. I was in the midst of a dark tunnel that I still feel traces of today. I was feeling something similar to a sensation I experienced in my teens when I first came off the streets. I had almost died three times at the hands of people I’d sold my body to in those days and after coming off the street and adapting to familiar routines of working and living under a roof, I could barely speak when in the company of other people. There was never a point in conversations at work, parties or gatherings where I could reveal what I’d seen. That weight of image and sensation wouldn’t come out until I picked up a pencil and started putting it down on paper. Here it was more than ten years later and I was having the same experience again. I felt like I was in the midst of wartime and the fucking explosions and heat were getting closer and closer; in fact I could see the bodies flying through the air just mere inches away and every fucking minute of every fucking day I felt like I could do nothing more than wait for that moment where I’d hear the whistling sound and feel the presence of the bomb tracking me. I was diagnosed not long after that.
As a kid I thought I would die amidst a tumbling of horse legs in the dust; I wanted to live in 1800s cowboy country and see my end tilting off a cliff with arrows piercing my body, or slow-motion hurling backwards under a fusillade of bullets in some self-styled bank robbery. These were the only possibilities of death and, aside from that, I would only think of death when I reached age eighty or ninety. To be losing one’s friends at a relatively young age leaves one with what I imagine a concentration camp survivor might feel—to be the repository of so many voices and memories and gestures of those who haven’t made it; those who have died from the way this disease was handled by those in positions of power; the fact that our mental structures are shifting at this early age to reveal our mortality for more than just a few seconds. A friend of mine recently said, “I remember my first feeling of fear—it was around age twenty-five or twenty-six,” and that statement approximates something about the odd feelings I have if I substitute the word death for “fear” in that statement.
I’ve come down with a case of shingles and it is so scary, I don’t even want to write about it. I don’t want to always think about death or the virus or illness. I don’t want to see in people’s eyes that witnessing of my or others’, silent decline. I don’t want the burden of acceptance of the idea of death, departure, of becoming fly food, as my friend Kiki would say. I don’t want to cease to exist. I don’t want my mobility to cease to exist. One can’t affect things in one’s death, other than momentarily. One cannot change one’s socks or tuck the sheets or covers around one’s own body in death. One cannot be vocal or witness the lies of time. I don’t want to witness the silencing of my own body. I don’t want to be polite and crawl into the media grave of “AIDS” and disappear quietly. I don’t want my death to have the pressured earmarks of courage or strength, which are usually catchphrases for the idea of politeness. I also cannot scream continuously without losing my voice. I wonder if it was the mid-’80s realization of the AIDS epidemic that woke me up and helped me draw back from the self-destruction that these other friends found themselves spinning into uncontrollably. I also marvel at how death can be so relentless and constant and how such enormous sections of the social landscape can be viciously exploded by a handful of rich white people, with an entire population’s approval and participation. And I am amazed to discover that I have been building a suit of armor in response to the extensive amount of death overtaking members of my social landscape. That suit of armor consists of making more of an attempt to continue each time I hear of a new death. The grief hardens and is added to the armor. The armor takes the shape of wanting to see an accountability taken by those responsible. I know I’m not going to die merely because I got fucked in the ass without a condom or because I swallowed a stranger’s semen. If I die it is because a handful of people in power, in organized religions and political institutions, believe that I am expendable. A
nd with that knowledge I lie down among the folds of my sheets and dream of the day when I cross an interior line. That line is made of a quota of strength and a limit of pain. I know those institutions are simply made of stones and those people are simply made of blood and muscle and bone, and I know how easily they can go, how easily I can take them with me. My thoughts consist of wondering if the earth will spin a little faster when my thoughts become action.
PHONE CALL:
“David … you know that friend of mine in Kentucky? Well I got a call from a friend of mine who just got back from being down there. She said he was getting way out of it … I mean, like … he had lost about fifty to seventy-five percent of his body weight and they were having to transfuse him once a week. He was down; he couldn’t walk at all. He was being carried around by his family, in a wheelchair and he had to go to the hospital every day, also, because of DHPG transfusions, because he was becoming blind from C.M.V. retinitis. So … uh … he would spend most of the mornings in the hospital and then the afternoons he would spend resting at this house that they had. Then he had a grand-mal seizure … and he was just like … you know—convulsing like crazy … I never seen one of those; I only heard … and uh … you know—he became all different colors … and … uh … was just gasping for breath and finally they were able to sedate him somehow so that the seizure ended … and … uh … this friend of mine who was very close to him went down to visit because his family had called and said, “It doesn’t look that great.” And … uh … I think, after being there just one or two nights, he was deteriorating—his fever went up very high and he was really kind of delirious all the time. They were giving him a lot of morphine. They had sent him home from the hospital; they stopped all the treatments and everything like that because they felt that this was just like … “Why torture him any more?” And … uh … at one point—finally, these two people—a friend and a family member—after he had had a small seizure and was in a semicoma—they just decided to put a pillow over his face … you know … do that … and there was no resistance or anything that they could tell … and … uh … I think they made a very courageous decision …”
Close to the Knives Page 20
