Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  One day the oldest guy caught me alone, playing in a half-built house in the construction zone. Nobody around for miles. He brought me up to the attic and had me stand on a box and tie his hands above one of the low ceiling rafters with a piece of rope. Then he told me to pull down his pants and take his large dick in my hands and pull on it. I did for a while until he began getting red in the face. I got bored and saw a box of insulation nearby, grabbed a handful of it and wrapped it around his dick and pulled. He screamed and I got scared and ran away. My father got a telephone call later and dragged me to the guy’s house, where the doctor’s black car sat in the driveway. After two hours of sitting on the lawn waiting for my father, he came out of the house, took me home, stripped me and beat me. At some point he took out his dick. I remember it was half-hard. He told me to play with it and when I refused he beat me some more. I remember running through the big house past a blur of faces: my brother, my sister, and my stepmother.

  The matador stands inside the ring, still as camouflage. In all the excitement, the bull doesn’t notice him. A picador on the blindfolded horse moves closer to the bull and stops. The bull comes out of its distraction, notices the horse and stops. It is motionless for a moment, then paws at the ground tossing clumps of earth, then charges forward. It rams the side of the horse, actually lifting the horse off the ground, planting his hind legs into the earth to better lift the horse in the air, twisting his head to drive the horns into flesh. But the padding tied around the horse protects it and it does nothing more than submit to the jostling. The man riding the horse lifts his arm in the air. He has a long wooden pole which has a sharp metal point. He plunges it into the bull between the shoulder blades and gores it with twisting motions. Hot blood pours out. The bull doesn’t give up for a while, then seems to finally understand the pain and backs off. Blood is streaming in sheets down its broad shoulders into the dust and heat.

  I tried to understand something about my father. I understood that he hated women. He hated children. And given that he shot or killed any animal he found me with, I guess he hated animals too. Obviously, he hated himself and I tried to find, in his limited biography, what he might have seen while looking into a mirror. It is all a terrible blank. He depended on the motions of the sea to escape, to nullify with the help of a whiskey bottle all the turning of his flesh and brain into the fields of aging. From the incidents I culled from family members about the later part of his life I learned that one day he started one brawl too many and almost killed a fellow worker. He got canned from his job after maybe thirty years of service, working the enormous boilers of various ships. (I could hear his words: “I would swell up so much from the intense heat I’d get stuck in a huge searing pipe and they would have to hose me down to get me out.”) Then after months of being landlocked, working a gas pump job, he damaged and maybe killed someone in a drunk-driving accident. (One of the scariest drunken wrecks he got us into was also my favorite because of its slow-motion memory of spinning and the entire landscape becoming a vortex of indiscernible shapes until the rutted fields of corn caught the underbelly of the car and slowed us down to a gentle stop.) Being caught drunk-driving, his license was taken away for life and he was reduced to riding a mo-ped to work. A little fifteen-mile-per-hour putt-putt machine. I understand that to be landlocked was his greatest fear; it was the most brilliant mirror held up to his soul. He hung himself in the basement of his suburban home on christmas eve, leaving his still body to be found by his last son.

  The neck muscles of the bull are pierced and maybe severed by the sharp steel tip of the picador’s pole. This causes the animal’s head to drop low to the ground and allows clearer aim of the matador’s sword into the area of the neck and shoulders, making a truer path into the bull’s heart. The primary energy with which the bull ran into the ring gives way in a short period of time to an exhausted display of the animal pawing at the earth, expelling volumes of blood from its body and caught forever in a frozen stream of information and stimuli so it remains from that point on in the waves of understanding that its own death is encircling its own pure desire for living. Smell the flowers while you can.

  I can pass my fingers fan-like across the front of my eyes, making the sun’s rays act like light through the spokes of a turning wheel, and still the dust rising beneath the front paw of the stomping bull takes on the abstract shape of Dakota’s presence. I don’t, like some of his other friends, see him waiting on street corners or among the crowds in the subway. But I do see him. I see the reflection of his face in the death of my father and realize that that was the last thought to come to me. Everything else I have written to this point was leading me into an indistinct memory of the day my father killed himself, which triggered twenty-four hours of me puking: off the side of the bed, into the avenue rushing with cars and pedestrians off the corner of forty-second street where I waited for my sister and her first husband to pick me up for the wake, along the interstate wherever they could pull over, and finally into the toilet on the second floor of my father’s house where I would be sleeping. I had touched his fingers in the casket to make sure he wasn’t fake. In the middle of the night, before the next day’s mass and funeral, I woke up with a start and walked the dark hallway to the bathroom again. When I pushed open the door I saw streams of light coming through the floor. A light turned on in the room below caused illumination to pour upwards through the three or four bullet holes from the time he emptied a gun after having pointed it at my stepmother’s head. She said, “I just continued to brush my hair, because I figured I was going to die. At the last moment he turned the gun up towards the ceiling.” Smell the flowers while you can.

  The banderillero walks to the center of the ring holding a ribboned and barbed stick in each hand. The bull notices and turns to watch with a fateful curiosity. The banderillero holds each stick delicately by the ends and crooks his arms upwards so that the barbed sticks are slightly above his own head, pointing at the bull. This action causes the banderillero to become an abstract image of a bull himself; the barbed sticks, his horns. The bull’s head is down and the animal is charging. At the last moment, the banderillero runs straight at the bull in short measured steps, arches his back, and stops midnight on tiptoes and thrusts the barbed sticks into the back of the animal, simultaneously sidestepping it. The enraged bull turns, throwing a spray of dirt, and chases the banderillero to the outer wall, where the man in a vaguely comical fear throws himself over in a scrambling leap. He returns moments later to repeat the actions until three sets of sticks are embedded in the bull’s back. The incessant flow of blood makes the bull gleam like a black mirror. Smell the flowers while you can.

  The pain I feel is to see my own death in the bull’s death; a projection of my own body’s nerve endings and nervous system onto the body of that exhausted and enraged animal. The grief and shock Dakota’s suicide produced in me was overwhelming, despite my having successfully managed to freeze out the weight of various other deaths in the last five years. I felt I stood the chance of going crazy and becoming a windmill of slaughter if I allowed myself the luxury of experiencing each of those deaths with the full weight accorded them. Dakota’s manner of death opened a door to all that I’ve been speaking of: all these lives and their possible deaths were held in suspension by my isolation and intentional lack of contact. Now I saw my father crawling around in the dirt like in some bunuelian film, with his hands reaching for me and his eyes in magnified close-up with their pupils reflecting small films of my desire. I have always been attracted to dangerous men, men whose gestures intimated the possibilities of violence, and I have always seduced them into states of gentle grace with my hands and lips. I have loved the sweetness of their blushing long after our body fluids stopped their arcing motions and settled onto the sheets; the sweet flush of their embarrassment at the realization of the tenderness of their momentary gestures. Dakota may have killed someone in order to get permission to end his own physical life. He did what he had to do, and
I respect him for it. Smell the flowers while you can.

  There is a gasp and cry from the crowd. The bull in all its twists and turns before the various assaults from the banderillero has broken its front left leg. When the bull is confronted with the matador’s cape, it drops its head low and paws at the ground, its leg goes floppy and obscenely doubles back on itself. After a wobbly charge, in trying to come to a stop, the bulls leg bends backwards and throws it into the dust. The crowd is caught in shocked identification. After surveying the situation, the matador shakes his head in sympathy and disgust. He arches his feet and points his sword at the bull in an affected graceful, arched motion. He takes aim with his X-ray eyes on that invisible point between the rolling curves of the bull’s shoulders; the true point where the entrance of the steel blade will still the heart. Smell the flowers while you can.

  When Tom and I first arrived at the hotel in Merida, we were given a tiny damp room that smelled of exterminator’s bug spray. The porter turned on the small black and white television and took his tip from my hands and left. On the tv was a north american cartoon of a mexican mouse wearing a sombrero and chattering in dubbed spanish. The world exhausted and depressed me. I went for a brief walk to the elegant green park in the center of the city. Leaning into the contours of a wood and steel bench, I watched the fragmented images of the city spilling into the pathed entrances of the walkways. A group of street kids no older than twelve sat on the stone curb and searched each others scalps for lice. Seeing a few shreds of humanity in a person causes me to immediately love them deeply. The transparent image of Dakota has wrapped his arms slowly around the living bodies of Joe and Johnny. The last time I hung out with Joe I realized something was beginning to return to his eyes, something human. Johnny seems to me to be still caught in the flux of chemicals, only now it is state-endorsed in the form of methadone. Something much more difficult to kick than heroin. But I still have hope for him, which may not do him any good anyway. He’s got to find what he needs somewhere deep in himself; some desire to again move forward. What cheers me is seeing these friends as fighters who have fallen to their knees but who are up again and returning to fighting condition before my eyes. I am glad I am alive to witness these things; giving words to this life of sensations is a relief. Smell the flowers while you can.

  The matador distracts the bull with his red cape and executes a small series of quick steps forward. The cape moves low to the ground, the bull drops his head for the imminent charge and in one quick thrust the blade of the sword is buried up to the hilt between the animal’s shoulder blades. But instead of collapsing, the bull continues to charge and is suddenly surrounded by banderilleros distracting it from every angle with various colored capes. One of the banderilleros comes up behind the bull, produces a short silver dagger and punches it into the back of the animal’s skull. He then wiggles it back and forth in quick brutal motions and the bull keels over sideways, flopping against the earth among a scattering of men’s legs. In a moment the bull’s legs jerk out spasmodically, blood issues from its nose and mouth, and it is dead. It excretes a stream of shit from its behind into the pale dust. Smell the flowers while you can.

  The transparent image of Dakota has placed coins onto the eyes of my father. He bends close to my mother and whispers something into her ear. I give my parents humanity, in deference to their victimization at the hands of their parents. Heads of Family; Heads of State. Whereas, I can step back from the forms of violence, psychic and physical, that I may have experienced as a child at the hands of Family—I step forward with the shield and sword to confront the State. Crimes against humanity have an unforgivable weight when compared to crime against an individual. If thirsty people demand the presence of the death penalty, let it be reserved solely for politicians who commit crimes against humanity. This goes for those politicians who wear religious drag and who kill us with their fake moral codes. The billion or more fragments of my living and my life lift up around me in a windswell, and through that swirling wall of snow-like images I reach way back and lay Dakota’s face at the base of the interior shrine. I also lay to rest his waiting dogs, his idling pickup truck, his ideas and desires. Smell the flowers while you can.

  Three horses, two of them white, the one in the middle black, tied together in a wooden brace, are led into the ring by two men, one on each side of the outer horses. The stock holding the horses in place, riding their necks, also has a contraption attached to it through which the men thread the rope which now binds the legs of the dead bull. Every task is performed in utter and complete silence. I feel I am watching a silent movie, a film silenced by the descending weight of death. The band is playing somberly as the horses suddenly bolt in unison, dragging the bull behind them through the dirt. A little man in a uniform, with a crudely built wheelbarrow, comes out into the ring and wheels up to the spot where the bull previously lay. He takes a small shovel out of the barrow and scoops up the blood-drenched earth and shit and tosses it into the barrow. The band stops playing just as the bull is pulled into the darkness of the tunnel’s shadows. The little man with the wheelbarrow filled with evidence is left pushing his cargo through waves of soundless heat. My body gives a gentle burp and stomach acids well up into my throat. Smell the flowers while you can.

  In the tiny room of the hotel he removes his pants and folds them, placing them neatly on the chair next to the bed. He unbuttons his shirt and climbs onto the bed sitting on the pillows with his back to the wall, his legs spread wide and slightly bent at the knees. The biceps of his arm is rolling softly beneath the tanned skin, mirroring the motions of his hand as it slowly pulls up and down on the length of his dick. He is smiling and has the same look in his eye as the bull did when it first charged into the ring. He places the bent disk of a rubber on the head of his dick and with the same jerking motion he unrolls it down the length of his desire. From where I stand at the foot of the bed, I think it’s lovely the way he pulls on his dick and then lets go of it momentarily so that when it throbs it lifts straight up into the air, affording me a view of his tight balls. And that relentless smile. There is a clear joy in his eyes as I lean forward and slowly crawl over the surface of the cool sheets with my destination firmly in mind. Smell the flowers while you can.

  We stay for two more fights and then stand up in the dizzying heat and head towards the concrete archways of the exit. We leave behind us the confirmed and imminent deaths of five more bulls. Moving through the cool silence of the shadowed passageways, we eventually step out into the sunlit grounds of the field surrounding the arena. To our left we notice a line of forty or more people waiting patiently for their turn at a makeshift counter that comprises, along with a metal-poled structure, a spontaneous meat market. Huge dripping sections of dead bulls are impaled on hooks or draped over the table. So little has been quartered that I could almost recognize which animal was which. The people waiting on line have the clothes and postures of exhausted poverty. As we stop to witness, the bulls disappear piece by piece. Behind us, far over the walls of the arena, the vague notes of the band begin again and float like thin banners across the hot sky. Meat. Blood. Memory. War. We rise to greet the State, to confront the State. Smell the flowers while you can.

  PERSONAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to …

  THE LIVING: Tom Rauffenbart, Patrick McDonnel, Nan Goldin, Siobhan, John Zinsser, David Coles and Peter Weiss of Center for Constitutional Rights, Paul Marcus, Susan Pyzow, Dr. Bob Friedman, Marion Scemama, Carlo McCormack, John Olsoff, Kathryn Barrett, Jonathan Gutoff, Anita Vitale, ACT-UP, Phil Zwickler, John Carlin, Elizabeth Hess, C. Carr, Lucy Lippard, David Hirsh, Bill Rice, Larry Mitchell, Karen Finley, Willy from the West Street days, Norman Frisch, Dennis Cooper, Old Reliable, Richard Kern, Amy Scholder, Ira Silverberg, Lydia Lunch, Ben Neill, Angela Davis, Judy Glantzman, Carmela Perri, Tommy and Amy Turner, Bill Burroughs, Philip Zimmerman, Jean Foos, Doug Bressler, Brian Butterick, Mary Hayslip, Phillip Yenawine, Cee Brown, Fran Lebowitz, Lynn Davis, Ba
rry Blinderman, Christina Nordholm, Laurie Dahlberg, Peter Spooner, Kiki Smith, Syd Stoldt, Sophie Breer, Kathy Acker, Tanya, DeFazio, Ishmael and his dark sexy work, 42nd Street Movie Houses, Ann Northrop, the drag queens along the Hudson River and their truly revolutionary states, and all the guys and girls future and past who give chaos reason and delight.

  THE DEAD: Peter Hujar, Keith Davis, Iolo, Montanna, Dean Savard, Arthur Bressan, Jr., Paul Proveaux, Cookie Mueller, Paul Thek, Luis Frangella, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Vito Russo for their beautiful brush fires in the social landscape.

  And special thanks to my editor, Karen Rinaldi, and her muse, Lenny Dykstra.

  About the Author

  David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1954, and first gained notice in New York’s East Village art scene in the 1970s. He rose to fame for his exceptional range, intelligence, and passion, and by the 1980s had become one of the most provocative artists of his generation. In the years before his death in 1992 from AIDS-related complications, he worked tirelessly as an AIDS activist and anticensorship advocate.

  In 1985, Wojnarowicz brought his fight for freedom of expression to the case of David Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, in which Donald E. Wildmon claimed that Wojnarowicz’s work was pornographic and undermined family values. Wojnarowicz won and was awarded a symbolic dollar. He was thrust back into the spotlight in 2010, at the center of a censorship battle over the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. In 2012, Cynthia Carr published the critically acclaimed biography Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz.