Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  SYLVIA: I think the problem is not so much that there’s something that we can’t fit into, because I don’t think the society or the situation is sitting there waiting to reject people; I don’t think it’s aware enough to say, “You don’t fit in.” I don’t think it’s that aware—I think that’s what the problem is. So I think of who makes it and who doesn’t and the pressure; a lot of it comes from us. We set a standard that we can’t even live up to. We expect too much of a society that is probably going to reject us—it’s probably not even thinking of us. I don’t want to have that struggle that’s trying to knock on the door and get in, and just sort of be invisible and float so you can do your own thing—I think that’s the part that comes from us; I don’t think that was set up; that’s the part that is hard to maintain. I mean, I want to adapt. I don’t think I’ll be giving anything up. I don’t care if I don’t value the thing I want to adapt to; it’s there—it’s a structure. I want to adapt to it; I don’t care if it’s something I don’t revere. I think the fact of wanting to adapt is what makes a difference whether we stick around or not. Some of us can’t. I wouldn’t think Dakota killed himself because he couldn’t stand the structure that was there and because he didn’t believe in anything it stood for and just would have no part of it, because if he felt that way, he’d just go and design his own. I think it was just not being able to fit into it no matter what it stood for.

  D.: Can the bigger structure make room for the smaller structure you design?

  SYLVIA: If you measure it against anything else, then you will always be susceptible to the other structure. You have to first get a little place inside the larger structure and then make your own. That’s the problem. If you want to stay separate completely you can’t, because you will always end up measuring it against the larger structure …

  PHONE INTERVIEW:

  BETH: I’ve known a lot of friends who’ve killed themselves but for some reason with Dakota I feel okay. I think he knew what he was doing. He was pretty reclusive—he lived only two miles away from me and we never saw each other, and he explained that he didn’t want to see anybody because he felt his personality was too absorbed in other people and he needed to be his own self. He had just recently got fired from his job because he got caught—he wrote his friend in Dallas and they found the letter, it came back to work—he wrote in full detail how he lied to his boss about his grandfather being sick and how he stayed home and got drunk every day. He got off drugs when he came to Houston. He was going to an asylum during the day but he didn’t think he was going to stay there at night. He killed himself with gas and a plastic bag. It sounded pretty painless. I feel like he comes in and out. I wish he could have left a book of his mind behind. I think he was too kind for this world. It kind of makes me cry to remember the sad parts of it, but with Dakota, more than anyone else who’s done it, I can understand it more. Sometimes I wonder if when people kill themselves they don’t leave as quickly; they circle around a bit longer. I told his brother to call me when he came to town, I was real anxious to get his ashes scattered. They’re in an urn at his parents’ house. I don’t think it really matters, but for a while I was anxious to get him beyond that spot. I hope his family doesn’t burn his stuff.

  TAPE RECORDING:

  DAVID: What was the first thing you felt when you heard he killed himself?

  JOHNNY: I was really upset that I never resolved my relationship with him—like when he ripped me off and then he moved away. He had a lot of guilt; he kept writing me all these letters saying: can you ever forgive me? Every time he called me he’d be really drunk. I have this feeling of being responsible in a way, but not really. So, one part of me, I feel awful that I never got to finish something with him and also help him get the burden off his back. The other side of me feels almost relieved for him because he tried to kill himself so many times. He was just a very unhappy person. Almost the entire time I knew him, he was that way. One thing was that he thought he was really ugly. He had a big crush on Joe and at one time maybe on me. He hung around people like us and we weren’t gay or anything but he would always hang around us. He hung around people he couldn’t have relationships with and I think that that was part of it. I think he’d had enough. In death you know you can’t come back but you know what you come back for. Some people believe in reincarnation and I’m sure some people commit suicide so that they can pop into another life. It doesn’t work like that but …

  DAVID: As far as I’m concerned, if there is reincarnation, I’m refusing to come back. Once is enough. If there is somebody you appear before who determines where and when you’ll come back—I’ll punch them in the face. Maybe that will put me on the end of a very long line for the return flight.

  JOHNNY: That’s the way I feel too.

  D: Why do you think he killed himself?

  J: A person like Dakota couldn’t live for too long in a place like texas. He couldn’t be satisfied. Did you hear how he’d amuse himself down there? One thing I’d heard that he was doing was breaking into people’s houses and putting on these cowboys’ cowboy hats and like putting on their gun belt and walking around the house naked and fantasizing about being involved in these people’s lives, I guess, and jerking off into their beds. I mean, if those people found him they probably would have shot him, y’know, like he was just going to great lengths to amuse himself in texas. I think in general he was a brilliant guy and who was he going to find in texas, I mean, as his peers—where could he find people that think like him, I mean nobody thought like Dakota anyways, at least no one I ever met. I think the boredom was too great.

  D: Yeah, but in New York he apparently tried to kill himself a few times.

  J: Yeah. I think that he was a beautiful person inside but he had this insecurity—as superior as he was spiritually I think he felt very alone and unable to connect with anybody and have a relationship including sex. He was great because he could just make things out of nothing; his music and drawings and cut-outs and writings.

  D: What do you feel about death?

  J: I have mixed feelings about it. While I’m here I want to make what I can out of it but sometimes I feel a desperation … death would be an end to the boredom … but … death is an escape, an alternative—I’m sure it’s a great experience, I mean all the experiences you hear about people who’ve died and come back—immediate peace and, depending on their spiritual beliefs, some people see their god or angels or choirs or buddha or whatever. I don’t know what I’m going to see, but people seem to get their ultimate spiritual fantasy when they die—mine would be …hahaha.

  D: I’d heard that you died a number of times.

  J: Three times that I can remember.

  D: So you might be dead now. ALRIGHT DAKOTA, YOU CAN COME OUT OF THE BACK ROOM NOW.

  J: Hahaha.

  D: Do you remember anything from when you died?

  J: I never had any mystical experiences. I was so drugged up that I couldn’t—although I guess if your spirit came out of your body it wouldn’t be drugged. I have no recollections at all. I was out for over a day at one time and I was in a coma. I stopped breathing and my heart was beating irregularly and they thought it was gonna stop and I was on a respirator. I remember waking up and they had everything—I was in intensive care and they had every function, like, they had a catheter in my dick and they had tubes in my nose; they had tubes everywhere, and when I first came out of it I had all these wires attached to my body to monitor my pulse and wires on my lungs to monitor my breathing and all this high-tech equipment like graphs behind me and the doctors told Laura, “Ask him if he knows where he is,” and I looked over one shoulder and then looked over the other shoulder and I said; “I’m on Star Trek.” Thats all I remember. It was too many combinations of alcohol and chemicals.

  D: What was the last thing you remember before blacking out?

  J: Breaking a mirror.

  TAPE RECORDING:

  D: What did you feel about Dakota possibly murdering
that guy?

  JOE: I thought it was great because I’ve wanted to do it a million times. I still have fantasies. My friend Keith has an AK-47; y’know, it’s a real accurate sniper rifle, and many times I’ve sat there in my apartment when the dealers are out there yelling and I wonder if I shot my little pistol out the window if I could hit them. And the AK-47 was there and I thought out every single way; I even wrote it out so I know what I’m doing—try to think of every single way I could do it and get away with it: shoot those drug dealers standing across the street. I figured if I could just shoot one or two of them standing in the doorway out there yelling, that the other ones would get the idea and quit, y’know? Dakota did it—I wish I could do it. My big problem with justifying killing drug dealers is that I once sold drugs. I would like to see my fantasies become real. I mean, look at all these killers—they have a tremendous fascination, depending on who they’re killing. I have a fascination for the S.L.A., even though it was a totally bogus organization, just because I can’t believe people actually carried it out—like the Weathermen, they actually did things like that. It’s about having a purpose; quitting drugs gave me a purpose …

  … Another thing I was thinking about is that thing where—say, with Dakota killing somebody—well, if somebody says to Dakota, “That’s crazy … that’s insane that you did that,” or if somebody kills someone else or somebody robs someone else and a person says, “How can you do that? That’s crazy, that’s insane, because that doesn’t fit into the rules of society as we know it.” If that’s the case, then how come not everybody who does a violent act can come up on an insanity plea? How come the rules change when it’s a thought or you verbalize it. Then people say, “That’s crazy,” if you do it, then it’s a crime. Then you’re not crazy; it’s a crime and you must be punished for it.

  You know, in theory, you can’t punish somebody who is crazy. Because nobody knows what they’re doing until they do it … and then they might have … I mean, premeditation is a very gray area that gets interpreted by the powers that be.

  TAPE RECORDING:

  DAVID: Okay—so, this guy killed somebody. What did you feel?

  JOHNNY: I felt really sad that he could do that. I knew what a breach of his own morals that was, and the fact that he went that far—I just saw it as a point of no return from that point on. I knew he’d be living in a lot of guilt. Some people can kill somebody and not have those feelings, not have that guilt. The ability to do violence is there to some extent in everybody unless you’re insane. But in somebody like Dakota, who was, on one level, super-rational—I could just imagine what he was living with. When he grew up he was the school geek and then later he was completely miserable doing drugs and feeling unsatisfied with his life because he had all these gifts and there was no place in the world, in the society, for people to embrace that. Not having any relationships, not being touched—it’s a terrible weight to carry. The thing about being attracted to examine violence and murder and stuff like that is partly the frustration of dealing with this structure imposed on us and feeling sick of all of it, and the other part is actually an intellectual and spiritual curiosity. Death is curious; it’s the ultimate ending. You have to look at Dakota’s writings to understand what he thought about death.

  TAPE RECORDING:

  JOE: … The people who were horrified; I’m sure if they were walking down the streets and saw somebody getting the fuck beat out of them they’d just keep right on walking. They wouldn’t run up and just start pulling people off. It’s primitive instinct—there’s killers inside us and that information’s suppressed by society. Say, if you were in the old west, and somebody stole your horse—you could hang them. It depends on how high in the hierarchy you are; whether you get away with it or are allowed to do it or not. In the south it was justifiable homicide if you shot your wife’s lover; or in France if a woman killed her husband you could get off with “crime of passion.” The rules always reflect the protection of the powers that be. That’s the way it’s always been. D.: Do you think Dakota killed himself because of guilt over stabbing that guy?

  JOE: No way.

  D: Other people I’ve talked to say they didn’t think Dakota could shoulder the weight of crossing that line.

  JOE: No way. Maybe … I—

  D: People are telling me all these stories of him not killing roaches and this kind of reverence for life and it seems like this schism between those descriptions and then this thing where he researches how to stab somebody the correct way—well maybe there isn’t really a schism, I mean all things contain their opposites within them. People who feel worthless all the time sometimes have a moment where they feel a great sense of power or self-worth; it’s just a spectrum between opposites. Plus, he had ripped off Johnny and he was getting paranoid and had to leave town. Johnny showed me these endless letters where the guilt for ripping him off was unbelievable; it was to the point where he wrote this one letter saying—I don’t know if it was something in his magic or what—but he said that judgment had been passed; the sentence had been passed and that they weren’t going to give him the chinese rope or something. From what I understood he wasn’t going to have to commit suicide but that the only way he could resolve having ripped off his best friend was that Johnny would have to stab him and everything would be okay. I don’t know if Johnny answered him but there were other letters saying please forgive me.

  JOE: I think I blew it, too, when I wrote him that letter saying, “Lay off all this homo shit.” That might’ve just slammed the door in his face, too.

  … My last contact with him was when I’d write him all these letters and he’d send me all this stuff from texas, so it was when I was doing all this speed; I was high all the time and doing all this kinko sex and I had all these fucking sicko pictures of me with all these various people, and me naked and various people doing weird sex and shit and I sent him this great big stack of porno pictures—lots of nude pictures of me, and the response from him was he started writing me all this homo stuff, all about this obsessive homo stuff he wanted to do with me. My head was like—I don’t wanna hear about it; I wrote him a letter saying, “Man I really love ya but stop writing me all this obsessive sex stuff because I don’t want to do it with you and it ain’t ever gonna happen”—and all I got back from him was this letter that said, “Sheeesh. What a grouch.” That was the last I’d heard from him. I can’t believe it, I just can’t fuckin’ believe it. This letter makes it more real; I don’t know … I start crying …

  D: So you don’t think his suicide had anything to do with remorse or guilt?

  JOE: I think it was more about looking down the line at endless remorse, and not waiting long enough for that remorse to go away …

  DREAM:

  I woke up and stepped out of a room into a second floor hallway dark with morning. All along the hall, ending at the top of the staircase that leads down, are all these street people: poor people lying in beat-up sleeping bags or under old frayed and dirty blankets. Some of them stir slightly as I pass them, walking towards the stairs. I stop halfway down the curved staircase. It’s a mansion with huge ceiling-to-floor windows and behind the windows there is the clearest wintery kind of light I have ever seen, and it is coming through the bare branches of large trees growing just outside. The light comes through the windows, and as I turn to follow its path into the enormous room, I see a grizzled and filthy vagrant. Under the large chandeliers he is dancing this odd waltz-like dance, his arms upraised in a classical elegance, slowly turning in the rays of light.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Late morning winter light bathes everything in the landscape, giving it an apparition of warmth. I’m sitting at a second-story table of a restaurant, behind the plate glass windows of some crummy piece of architecture, feeling dark. Maybe it’s what we call “sadness,” maybe it is darker than that, and all I can think about is the end of my life.

  In the far distance, at the edge of the runways, is a thin wedge of horizon made
up of dead brush, maybe trees—it is formless, other than the enormous rusted oil refinery thing and the couple of odd buildings made up of blond concrete and shadows. What does it all mean? What’s going on in this head of mine? What’s going on in this body, in these hands that want to wander that guy’s legs over there?

  I just had a fight with my boyfriend in the middle of the airport, twenty minutes before boarding a plane to Mexico. I console myself with the sight of the construction crew in the fenced-off area of the runway asphalt. I can count eight or nine of them in winter drag and helmets, and I feel like shit; years ago I could start thinking of what the interiors of those construction trailers look like, filled with drafting tables or cheap oak furniture and calendars and ringing phones; I would have had fantasies of one of the crew taking me inside and locking the door, a ratty couch over to the side, and him removing his sweater and thermal undershirt all in one move, so I could reach over and put his sweat on my palms—but that is a drift of thought that takes a lot of effort right now and I don’t care about making that effort. What does it mean, what for and why? The red tail-fins of some of the planes parked nearby have white crosses on their sides, and I think of ambulances—oh, love is wounding me and I’m afraid death is making me lose touch with the faces of those I love; I’m losing touch with the current of timelessness that drove me through all my life ’til now. Maybe I won’t grow old with a fattening belly and some old dog toothless and tongue hanging. I won’t grow old and maybe I want to. Maybe nothing can save me despite all my dreams as a kid and all my dreams as a young guy having fallen to their knees inside my head.

  I wished for years and years that I could separate into ten versions of myself in order to give each person I loved a part of myself forever, and have some left over to drift across landscapes and maybe even to go into death or areas which were deadly, and have enough of me to survive the deaths of one or two of me. I thought this was appropriate for all of my desires but I never figured out how to manage it and now I am in danger of losing the only one of me around. I’m in danger of losing my life and what gesture can convey or stop this possibility? What gesture of hands or mind can shut it down in its invisible tracks? Nothing. And that saddens me.