Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  I found myself in the midst of a media spectacle concerning an essay I wrote for an exhibition at a publicly funded space downtown. The show concerned AIDS in a community of friends. The government agency that partially funded the show stepped in and yanked the funding because I called a notorious bigot in st. patrick’s cathedral a “fat cannibal.” I regret that I didn’t take the time to go public and apologize to the cardinal for calling him “fat”—thereby inadvertently insulting people with weight problems. Being that this cardinal is such a media ham and has secret martyr fantasies, it didn’t take him long to pull his skirts up and reveal his psychotic intentions in the AIDS epidemic. Within a week, the vatican and the cardinal put forth their opinion that, “It is a much more terrible thing to use condoms than it is to contract AIDS.”

  A number of letters arrived in my name at the exhibition space and a person who worked there put them in a large envelope and mailed them to my home address. The envelope was lost for a month and a half in the new york city postal system. I finally received the package about two months ago. There were a few letters from born-again christians wondering about the state of my soul. I never bothered to read them once I got to the first mention of “jesus”—besides the fact that there were no tape recorders in those days and the guy they call jesus was wildly misquoted—born-again christians are worse than reformed smokers.

  One of the other letters was from a married lawyer in another state who had once been of essential help to me in getting off the streets as a teenager. He and I had had a relationship that started out as sexual, with money changing hands, and ended in a real communication that helped me take the steps to get off the conveyor belt of 42nd street that gave a one-way ride into the mouth of a giant grinning deathskull. I’d met guys this society would incarcerate or kill who gave me more than any government official, state agency, or christian outfit like the salvation army ever did or could.

  The other letter was from Dakota.

  TAPE RECORDING:

  JOE: Once you recognize the shape of something, the thrill of it is gone—well, the death appeal, I realized for me is: I recognize the mechanics of what I’m doing and then it loses its appeal and I look at the fact that this is gonna be my life forever, doing the same thing—and I ain’t just talking about drugs. I’m talking about everything. This is what made me leave North Carolina and come to New York. It’s looking down the line and realizing that this is the way it is until I die and most of the time the dissatisfaction with that outlook makes me essentially know what my life is gonna be like. Here is death down here at the end and you’re up here looking down this line, then you say, just like in the tv commercial where they go like, “Take a Certs,” and then you go swoosh, and you say, “Let’s just move death right up here,” and skip all this shit because it’s gonna be the same thing over and over again … it makes death seem appealing. I just had that feeling the other day, it’s like, “Oh. Great! This goes on forever.” Why don’t I just move it up and get it over with. I’m sure that that’s what was happening to Dakota, especially when you come off drugs; I’ve said this over and over again, I mean, you look at the sum total of your life and it’s usually in a pretty big wreck behind you and it’s almost impossible to see ahead of you to see the changes. Only when you can get some real distance on it can you see that the future can be just as exciting as the past was, because you have no idea what’s gonna happen. So then it makes it more appealing to live.

  D.: That’s what I’m trying to get at. The grainy kind of dark shit that’s already there in the psychic landscape of america, in the structure of things we’re trying to survive in—but then, when you add the drugs to it, it exacerbates it in a way so subtle that you don’t even realize it and it’s so consuming that there’s no point in stopping the drugs. Plus, once addiction sets in even if you can magically get to a place where you could get perspective on it, you’re already caught in its gears. I mean, in the midst of the fake moral screens of government and organized religion that chews up life rather than supporting life, all the structure we’re told to assume in the midst of heavy control and manipulation—even the violent act that Dakota created—it’s totally recognizable what that anger is: the desire to tear through what is outlined for you to follow, and you know it’s not true to you. There’s nothing about the government’s actions or the actions of rich white people in power that can convince us that that outline is true. We’re told not to cross certain lines, and yet those lines are crossed every day by those in power, in the guise of protecting interests or whatever. What I understand about the things you make and the things Dakota made is that if the government and institutions want to play this game called “freedom” and they want to speak at political rallies and say, “Yes. yes. yes. We have freedom in this society,” then people are going to push at these invisible boundaries to see if it’s true. But what is the attraction to death images? Is the attraction based on the idea that death is coming anyway? So why not speed up the process because we’re just exhausting ourselves waiting?

  JOE: Not so much that it’s coming, it’s just that in society we have such a high thrill index, due to the way everything is assimilated so fast with the media, especially with tv. We have a desire for a quick end, y’know people, I think this is a common thread in all people, not just us. Once you recognize the void, how do you fill it? Most people fill it with money, fill it with romance, with thrills—but most people are afraid to carry it out to it’s logical end, to where they really want it to carry them, so as a result we have tv shows that show people getting caught by the cops and doing all these crimes because it’s real people doing real crimes that we wish we could do. Or it’s people loving to see someone get seriously murdered just because they don’t do it themselves. It’s no secret that people have a big fascination for the Manson cult or Patty Hearst or the S.L.A. or something like that, because they do what people wish they could, because all people feel these same things about society. Well, I think all people feel this inside, but a lot of them just bury these feelings under a lot of other stuff.

  D.: It’s true. I feel that only the “insane” may not feel this impulse to shred these screens.

  JOE: Only the people who don’t accept it—that’s the dividing line. There are people who accept the way things are and the way things are gonna be and then there are those who don’t. Dakota was one of the ones who didn’t accept the way things are gonna be—so he did something about it. You and I see the same things he did but we have chosen to accept the way things are. That’s a real challenge—to keep doing things in spite of the way things are. I still have these very violent fantasies. A good example: Joe Stark, or Donald Westlake, as he’s known, wrote this whole series of books about this guy Parker. They came out during the Vietnam war and during the Nixon years and they were all methodical accounts of this guy Parker planning these bank jobs or these big heists and never getting caught, and he was totally emotionless. The national attitude was: we hate Nixon and what he’s done, what he did was all wrong, and yet these books were totally popular because people still had these fantasies of doing these totally anonymous crimes against the system. I have a real problem with that still—when I went out to california I was looking for somebody who wanted to do real jobs, that was the thing and I could never figure it out. I just didn’t give a fuck at that point, and that was right when I came off drugs. I still have these fantasies: I try and think of places I can just go in and rob. Who knows? Maybe I will someday, and if I do nobody’ll ever fucking hear about it …

  JOURNAL ENTRY:

  I wrote Dakota and haven’t heard back from him. I included my telephone number and asked him to call collect. Nada. I’ve been starting to obsess about seeing him. I know he carries something that I recognized when I first met him years ago and maybe with him being clean for the first time in years I can touch that with him. Maybe he can show me something in myself, some essential tool that will connect all these fragments I’ve seen. I feel like
I am half stationary and half seated on a weird carnival ride, being flipped up and down and all around, but really it is nothing more than going through the paces of each day. Maybe it’s the information coming through electronic instruments: this person died, that person’s dying, so and so died, on tv. I’m still hearing “fag” jokes, president Bush holds a press conference to tell the world he hates broccoli, Jeane Kirkpatrick sits on television talking about the glorious state of the u.s.a., and all I can think of is gallons of human blood. Nixon is telling everyone it never happened, Ryan White has died and already the media has replaced him with a ten-year-old from portland who says, “It ain’t a bad disease …” while Ted Koppel, the announcer, says, “Why do you think adults act so silly about it?”—Silly?—do you poke a microphone in the face of a ten-year-old and suggest that Hitler was being silly?

  I wrote Dakota another postcard, telling him I wanted to try to go down to texas and hang out with him and maybe ride the back roads together. I’d heard about some legendary swimming holes where, among the moccasins and alligators, country boys play naked country boy games in the shore reeds. I tell him that Joe is clean and in N.A., that Johnny is on methadone and he and Laura have a kid—a sweet big-headed little guy with huge eyes filled with amazement or confusion. I don’t know what I think anymore. I feel like some terribly important question is left hanging in the air. I ask Dakota why he isn’t answering my letters.

  PHONE CALL:

  “Hi David. Remember at the beginning of February … I looked down at my leg and saw this purple spot and everybody’s trying to convince me it wasn’t a purple spot? Uh, uh—no mole here. I knew it was a K. lesion. I decided to go to Berlin to the film festival, had a great time, came back and had an appointment with the ophthalmologist. I’ve never gone to see an ophthalmologist, but everybody is talking about C.M.V. retinitis—it’s the latest dance craze … I decided to check it out, you know—me and my nineteen T-cells—I have to be aware of these things before any symptoms appear. So she didn’t find any C.M.V. retinitis, thank god, but she did find P.C.P. in my eyes, which is the pneumonia thing, and this is very very unusual—she said she’s seen only three or four cases … whatever … and I didn’t have any symptoms or anything. She called up my doctor right away, and he took the phone call, which is very unusual in and of itself. He gave me a thorough examination without an appointment, which is even more unusual. He told me I had to go to the hospital right away and start treatments. I thought: What is going on here? I went, in one month, from being asymptomatic to having one little K. lesion and now to having P.C.P. It was that nightmare of moving from stage to stage in the disease’s progression that everybody fears … and … uh … alright. I didn’t have a place to live at this point; everything was upside down. I felt very out of place in the world. So I went into the hospital. I’ve never been hospitalized in my adult life. I went into co-op care. My doctor comes in and puts in this heparin lock, which is an intravenous line, and they started my treatments and I stayed there for fourteen days. By the end of my stay there the pentamidine started overwhelming me to the point where I became anorexic, and I couldn’t eat anything. Everything tasted like it had a chromium edge to it. They took chest X rays and found P.C.P. in my lungs even though I’d been doing the aerosol pentamidine treatments. Then it was over. I moved into a new apartment and thought things were more or less in order and I went to the doctor to get a blood test and my red blood cell count went all the way down. I was white as a ghost. I don’t know if you know that feeling of looking at yourself in the mirror and going: “Oh my god—there is definitely something wrong.” They took me off all medication—I’d been doing D.D.I. That was frightening, too, because there is some sort of psychological dependency where you go: “well, I’m doing this stuff, so, good things have a chance of happening.” The doctor thought, maybe it’s just a transient anemia, we’ll wash the pentamidine out of your body and maybe it will just have been a drug reaction. He didn’t want to give me a transfusion because that’s dangerous for people with AIDS because you never know what kind of infection you’ll pick up from other people’s blood. I mean, if you can do without it—fine. So I said okay. For three weeks in a row I went to the doctor, but the red blood cell count didn’t go up much. He told me that he really wanted me to have a bone marrow biopsy. That frightened the shit out of me. They come at you with a needle that is quite long, quite sharp, and they put it in a spot that is quite painful. I’m getting really anxious—I’ve never been this scared. My parents came into the office while the procedure was being done. They shot the whole area up with Novacaine, which really burns, and while the whole thing was happening I knew what was going on—that the doctor was going into my body with a giant needle and taking out part of my bone. It wasn’t that painful. It was sore for a couple of days afterward—I couldn’t walk around that well. I haven’t heard back on the results yet and I’m in the middle of an anxiety attack over what that will be …”

  JOURNAL ENTRY:

  I picked up an envelope from the staircase where all the mail gets pushed through the slot. It was simply addressed to David W.—Why is it we know when something is up? I stepped into the street with my arms full of packages trying to get this envelope open. Rain clouds are covering the whole earth and the construction workers are standing around eating baloney sandwiches and ogling women. Kiki once said she wished she could raise her hand and their dicks would wither and fall off. I’m trying to get this fucking envelope open with cold fingers and the paper is fibrous and I couldn’t get the letter out, so in impatience I bent back the top fold in the letter and read:

  “.… committed suicide around january …”

  and I stopped in shock. I’d built the armor well, I thought. I learned how to freeze out death and the intensity of reactions to it. But the death I was freezing out was the death of people who were fighting to live and, despite that, were killed by a microscopic virus and a conservative agenda. Suicide slipped through a minuscule chink in the armor. I thought of my friend in Philadelphia and wondered if he didn’t really die of AIDS-related pancreatic cancer like I’d been told. Then I thought of Johnny and Joe; I thought of bodies with blank faces waiting to be filled in with identity. I yanked the letter out. It was from his father. It was unsigned and had no return address and informed me that Dakota had committed suicide in January.

  I felt like my soul was slammed against a stone wall. I started crying, something I haven’t done in months. There was something about the last half year, about all the deaths in the air. I’d been wondering if death has become so constant that I will never feel anything again. I fear losing the ability to feel the weight and depth of each life that folds up, sinks, and disappears from our sight. I thought of whether anyone will be able to feel anything about my death if it takes place. Is it all becoming the sensation one feels when they pass a dead bird in the street and all you can do is acknowledge it and move on. I thought of the late night tv announcer’s voice saying, “In the Insect World, after the attack, the slaughter, and the massive loss of life in the colony is over, life simply goes on. Each insect goes back about its job without any thought towards fortification or defense …” Dakota’s suicide left me with a sensation that there was something that was so irretrievable. Suicide is a form of death that contains a period of time before it to which my mind can walk back into and imagine a gesture or word that might tie an invisible rope around that person’s foot to prevent them from floating free of the surface of the earth. I keep going back there and I am on a jet plane that is arriving in texas and I am seeing his dogs and his pickup truck and I am seeing him and he is vanishing and his dogs are sitting lonely in the yard. All I see is his absence, a void, a dark smudge in the air where he previously occupied space: “Man, why did you do it? Why didn’t you wait for the possibilities to reveal themselves in this shit country, on this planet? Why didn’t you fucking go swimming in the cold gray ocean instead? Why didn’t you call?”

  TAPE RECORD
ING:

  DAVID: What was familiar to you in terms of his desire to kill himself?

  SYLVIA: I just think it’s a constant struggle. It could be a daily thing, I mean for me—I know I’ll always be here—its probably the vision; just the idea of having to go through this for fifty more years; whatever it is, or just being aware that life is something that we have to get through, and you have to work so hard to make sense of it. It makes me mad when someone kills themselves, it makes me feel bad that I wasn’t there, and what could I do? Besides that, I don’t blame him, for him to stay alive; it was probably easier for him to kill himself rather than sit around thinking of it and try not to. It seems as if your life is trying to stay alive as opposed to just living. Just looking at things from the negative side and trying to make it positive wears on you. How do you maintain an element where you’re happy; how do you find a little scope that you’re the center of—you can’t stay in the center of it—there’s too much other life coming in.

  D.: What creates that pressure or that feeling of struggling to survive rather than just living?