In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  Death and birth are just so much seawater floating around the curl of rocks and sand, there are pyramids and cliff dwellings that open their doors like great yawns to the upcoming sun.

  How slowly we enter age and sleep, were it all a matter of putting one’s head down and thought escaping like air from the insides of punctured tubes, movement would be a thin rose in the beaks of winged animals and today: a day of work and weariness would no longer be a necessity.

  Food enters the mouth on the sharp edge of steel; it is not everything that we have bellies full or that our hair is shiny and combed. There are those of us that sleep well in doorways and on benches, not for reason or choice but because of the hard edge of vision in these times.

  If I turned from twenty-three to eighty in the simple sway from window to bed what lives would remain in my heart, what answers to the questions of solitude and movement?

  September 25, 1977

  Gonna put together a collection of voices—overheard monologues or character monologues that’ll consist of junkies in a Chinese/American restaurant in Frisco, junkie on 8th Avenue and 43rd, Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, Mike the bookstore guard, and the kid in Reno pickup truck, Huncke and others.* Illustrations will be photos of odd moments/people retreating into darkness/around corners/sliding off tables in old restaurants/back views/views from the shoulders down.

  [No date] 9:30 P.M.

  Phone woke me at ten with Dennis on the other end. I was foggy and rubbery I couldn’t get my brains unscrambled. He was in Rahway, New Jersey, and was ill—possibly a flu—needed someone with a car to come and pick him up. I got the number of the pay phone he was nearby and promised to call him back. Then sat with my phone/address book and called everybody to get a car. Most were not home and those who were didn’t have a car at their disposal. Talked with Mom and she sounded slightly out of it—like pressure everywhere. She told me a story on young New York poets—with me, Dennis, and John in it, was going into Fordham Paper over the weekend. I called Syd in New Jersey; first time we talked in two years. I was afraid to call at first as I didn’t know what was going on in his life, like maybe everything had changed and he was no longer interested in going out anymore. He was real happy to hear from me and we made plans to get together this coming Thursday. I realized how much I missed and love him. I would spend the rest of my life easy with that man if he weren’t married and was open to a relationship—seriously. I grew through more heavy areas in my life with his aid than with anyone I know, and to renew contact with him was good.

  I finally tried Laura and she agreed to come out with me to Dennis’s spot and pick him up. I met her after a quick shower at Penn Central and we caught a bus out to her parents’ house in Long Island. After arriving we discovered the keys were with her father at his job and we had to take a taxi over to pick them up. After that I called and said I wasn’t coming to work till late and then we split. Made it out to Rahway hours later over the Verrazano Bridge through Staten Island and over the Goethals Bridge. Poor Dennis looked like Papa Grump with his thermal pants and undershirt. He looked healthy but moved around like he was tired and sick. We drove him home after loading the bike into the car and he gave yells of New York! God! I don’t believe I’m home! etc. Laura let me drive for a period. Over the Verrazano I took the wheel and drove the rest of the way. Did okay although a slight mistake once. Sure I could pass the exam if I took it, ya know?

  After Dennis went to sleep Laura and I stayed in the room adjacent to the kitchen and talked and listened to Handel, Wagner, and the Stones for a while. She reached towards me several times, wrapped her arms around me and I responded but held back as I felt it would be a bad thing for both of us if it went further. I don’t want to start getting into a heavy relationship with her as there are too many complications in both our lives and though I do love her things won’t be ironed out or balanced by that love. I called Jim and Louie and they told me to come right over so I walked Laura to the car and kissed her good-bye. She split to her parents’ house on Long Island and I bought a bottle of wine and headed down to the party. The party was pretty nice. Jim and Louie had invited a lot of men all involved in the arts to a certain extent some maybe not but a diverse set of characters. I drank a couple of beers and didn’t talk most of the evening as I felt removed from everybody. Don’t know why, just felt slightly inhibited as I knew no one well enough and tire easily of bullshitting conversations. I don’t like to talk unless I mean what I’m saying, can’t make small talk too well when I’m feeling down or inhibited so said little. Met this fella named John—the one person I did talk to for any period of time. He’s an artist/painter, studies at the Art Students League, and works there making sandwiches once a week on Saturdays. We talked about hitchhiking and gradually I started feeling warm in my belly over him, wanted to tell him or say something to indicate what I was feeling but was unable to. Hope to see him again sometime.

  October 6, 1977

  Met Syd down near Port Authority on 9th Avenue in the rush of squallin’ buses and fruit market pedestrian ballet. We headed for New Jersey and went to a motel/hotel across from the railroad tracks and across the street from mobile homes and trucks in the parking lot, etc. We talked about our past two years and I was glad we finally made it back together. It’s amazing how he has grown in two years. I guess he’s in his late forties or fifties and he made me kinda sad at times as I miss him and to hear some of the changes he and his family have gone through is amazing, all of them—the son shooting dope in the army, getting discharged, and eating himself into blimp size; wife getting operations on her ovaries, I think a hysterectomy; other children doing well. It was raining and we sat afterwards in a diner and ate lunch and talked about the city and its homosexual scenes, bars, etc. He drove me back later and I got out on the familiar spot on 40th and 9th to the side of the fruit stand, waved good-bye, and split across the honk snarlin’ streets flap into the Port Authority building.

  October 8, 1977

  Went out to New Jersey and did the suburban trip for the day. It was pretty nice. First time I mowed the lawn in thirteen years or more I guess. Then we toppled the big weed tree in the front yard as it was dwarfing the huge red oak tree Dad had planted. I shaped the hedges square ’cause every other neighbor on the block had square hedges and I figured the house shouldn’t look so conspicuous. Ha ha. So then me and Peter [David’s younger half brother] got ripped on our asses. I toked some gold smoke in a homemade apple pipe Peter fashioned—real good idea. We got together with Billy Wayne and about six other kids and played nighttime basketball on an illuminated court in the woods with no lights around other than those of occasional car goin’ on or off or by. Fuckin’ stoned and played our asses off with great fun and glee. My perceptions were so strange—I’d be dribbling like a madman with quasi-fancy steps and think I see the basket a couple of feet behind me over my left shoulder so I’d spin around to shoot and blam! The basket would be twelve yards or more away. Then I’d go in for a layup shot and ZIP ZIP ZIP run like a drunken arrow towards the basket and do a layup and jump and sail and look up and there’s the basket sailing by thirty-five miles an hour past and twist through (wangle) I’d pump a greasy shot in crazy and usually miss. Once in a while plip! It’d go in.

  Before goin’ to sleep Marion [David’s stepmother] was complainin’ about the work she’s gotta do and how the kids don’t seem to understand it all and she rambled on and on for about an hour and it was like she was realizin’ how much she really loves the kids and how they try in certain ways and she ended with, They’re pretty good kids, ya know? And I said, Well you’re a pretty good mother, and she brightened up. It was a good moment for the two of us.

  Before I went to sleep, I used the upstairs bathroom and in the floor were three bullet holes from where Dad shot a gun one night drunk. Made me feel strange and cold seein’ it.

  * A chapbook of these monologues, Sounds in the Distance, was published in 1982 by Aloes Books, London, with a foreword by W
illiam S. Burroughs. In 1996, a more comprehensive volume of the monologues, The Waterfront Journals, was published posthumously by Grove Press.

  April 1978

  Human Head III

  April 22, 1978

  Dirk has a photograph that I wanna use for the cover of my monologues if they’re accepted by any publishing group. He wants to do the layout for it (cover). The photo is a black-and-white of me with glasses off and hair slicked back. Linda and [Jan?] are in background fading away. It’s a sharp high-contrast photo where I look (if nothing else) real striking slightly bizarre—not enough to distort what I feel about myself, and there’s enough space for the title.

  Harold is gonna lend me this typewriter next week to use for a week or two. I’m gonna type out all the monologues and send them off to Ferlinghetti at City Lights. Am thinking that that collection plus a couple of stories would be good as a book. Maybe photos by Dirk and Arthur Tress. Maybe no photos at all. Anyway it’s all a major step as far as suddenly seeing enough good work by myself to send out to publishers—ain’t worried about it being rejected as I’ll put it out myself under the Redd Herring Press if no response from elsewhere. “Nevada Green,” my story on the shotgun-wielding kids who picked me up outside of Reno for the twenty-seven-hour ride through cold mountains and dazzling heat, is shaping up slow but sure. Got lots of work in store for me there. Maybe send it to Playboy if I finish it and think there’s a chance. Could use the money badly as Dennis says I’m all caught up in bills except the month’s rent. And Red M/Zone party is coming up in two weeks. I need new fuckin’ glasses, clothes, etc. Louis Cartwright’s book needs $$ to be printed. It all brings a vast headache up to the shoulders. Phenas[?] wrote me from Crete and also Oxford, England. Things are going fine with him. I have to sit down and write him soon.

  April 25, 1978

  Met Syd tonight after work. We sat in a burger house and talked for an hour. I feel stilted in seeing him—seeing him means money for sex. I realize that when I met him one summer afternoon, I was fourteen and it was a sultry day—very little luck in hustling—the deaf-mute wasn’t into going through fuck-fuck motions with his limp cock, and all the other people that had approached me wanted either film shots for ridiculous fees or heavy out-of-the-way (Far Rockaway or New Jersey) sex for five dollars. I was getting depressed not being in the money—John was with me and he had one fling which netted ten dollars and we both saw this guy checking us out and smiling from behind a newsstand, but the guy said he was interested in me. That was a bit of a rush. I was so used to men wanting John over me. We went up to the hotel on 44th Street or 45th up the rank rickety swaying leaning staircase paid seven dollars for a room and opened the windows to let the musty smell out. He was about thirty-seven and had a hard swimmer’s body—very handsome—and I slowly undressed conscious of my white body, slim and angular against the dark colored walls. Set my clothes on the peeling hanger and we climbed into the cool sheets, the 8th Avenue wind from the river blowing the dirty curtains out over the Avenue—street sounds and prostitute clatter of heels mixed with traffic flowing in—a smooth and slow sex—laying back afterwards with thumping chests and sweat lining my neck and body warm breeze drying it all off—sheets moist and we talked slowly I had no idea of what price it all cost and he gave me twenty dollars. He was really nice, considerate, witty, and laid a calm hand to my chest for a while as he talked of sections of his life. We parted and saw each other regularly. At times his family was away at the shore and we would go to his huge mansionlike house in some rich section of New Jersey and in the backyard under the trees and stars lay out a blanket and made a wild love with fucking mosquitoes sending huge welts up my legs and sides and neck.

  Seeing him tonight—years after all this was over—he had grown so much older—tight lines around his forehead and eyes—body kinda shrunken and bony. He talked about how his life was going (one of the monologues is his). I tried to explain to him what I was doing with my writing and art but realized that what I wanted to tell him was that I was successful—being published by this company and that company. But it wasn’t possible because my writing is still being formed and there is no demand for it. The reason I wanted to tell him I was successful was to ease the concern on his part—to ease some kind of parental fears that I picked up from him. I told him this is what I was feeling. I told him that I didn’t know what I wanted to do in my life other than paint and write. He suggested getting involved in some kind of company to pursue an interest and climb the ladder. I found it difficult to explain that I wasn’t really at all concerned with notions of success in that sense—sure, I want to be recognized for what I do, but I couldn’t get into the whole notion of competition, that if the by-product of my art acted as its own competition on the outside—on the street or wherever—fine, I have nothing to do with that. I could not, would not enter into the pushing of my work for competition’s sake. I could not willingly get behind something I did and get into the dogfight of it all.

  When we left the restaurant he stopped on the street and asked me how I was doing for money. I said I was desperate. He said How much do you need? and I couldn’t say. Money from him, I haven’t wanted money from him since I was eighteen. Never wanted to get paid for sex ever and yet I was broke, in debt for forty or fifty dollars plus rent and so he said how much? twenty dollars? forty dollars? I still shook my head, caught in the fucking nerve wires of resistance and need—opposites of the whole mess of what my life pointed to at that second. He said, One hundred dollars? Look, ya gotta give me some idea. Ya need rent money? What do you need? Tell me. I shook my head, I was stunned. He shoved one hundred dollars into my hand and I started trembling, crying, and shaking, the release of everything, relief of money needs, I stammered, said, Man … I don’t know what to say, all these years I’ve wanted to tell you things but didn’t know how. I mean, at this point I’m happy with what I’m doing in my life but when I was hustling, when I was in the Square at a certain point in my life, I really needed to connect with someone and you were really important then. You helped me through so many things, in ways you might not even be aware of.

  He said, Well, that makes me feel really happy. And I shook his hand and we said good night simultaneously and he turned and split and I turned before he turned and I stood at the corner waiting for the light to change to get across to the subway and was overtaken again and started crying.

  May 2, 1978

  Been working regularly on my monologues, still thinking out ideas for Artists Postcards series. The monologues are coming along fine—there’s some beautiful movement in them, genuine revelatory progression where character is revealing through conversation in an unusual way, where the thought starts out in coffee shop banter and in progression parts the gray range letting slip out some bleak or warm wing of the heart, the mirror behind the eye slowly revolving. What excites me most is the potential of friends’ stories for monologues, got a beautiful one from Syd that came from my meeting with him recently. It shows a tenderness mixed with ambiguity that is revealed within the words—a sad sort of ambiguity/struggle with the spirit in between social demands and physical/mental demands. Most of the monologues are people once met and then left suddenly such as in car rides cross-country, early-morning rail encounters, overheard coffee shop conversations, etc. They are diverse enough to allow a continual transformation in the mind/eye. The experience of them gradually broadens and hopefully in the end one will be transformed in consciousness and in experience. Private personal glimpses into the makeup of character, of America symbolized/represented by a handful of characters. There’s still an enormous amount of typing/editing in store for monologues that were written down in loose form, editing of the sections that slow down the emitting heart, the unnecessary sections of speech that hinder the sections that contain the glimpse—the aperture of the dream.

  May 25, 1978

  Arthur called me this morning to say good-bye. He will be splitting soon to go to California. He said Artists Postcard
s will contact me personally in a month with the answer in regards to my postcard—the possible acceptance of it for the show. He said he wrote me a letter and is mailing it today to me. I can’t think of what it will contain—faint ideas that it may be in regards to our relationship. If I go to Europe in three months I won’t see him and I don’t know how I feel about that. I mean that I will miss him greatly, but I don’t know if living in Europe will be difficult because of my loss of contact with him and all my friends. I’ll be leaving so many people—my whole life behind me at that point as Europe represents total and uncommitted freedom—a drastic change in lifestyle and surroundings. I’ll have no choice but to go ahead further into my life and explore possibilities as there will be no retreat into comfort of friends and lovers. I wonder if sex is possible with language barriers and secludedness of Normandy or offensive Parisians who won’t speak to Americans, etc. It will be a confrontation of the senses.

  August–September 1978

  New York–France

  August 27, 1978

  Met a fella Friday night. Went into the Village after work and there was this character standing in front of B&S (Boots & Saddles) Bar and as I passed by him I realized that it was someone I had seen a number of times in Julius’s but never spoke to—a fella who struck me as familiar in some nonspoken sense—like I knew him from somewhere but wasn’t sure if he was just familiar from passing a number of times on the street or if he was from some place or gathering in the past. As I passed him it suddenly struck me that he was a man I went home with at age thirteen or fourteen and that was up on 58th Street near the park. The fella back then had had a swimmer’s body—the first very handsome guy I’d ever gone to bed with. That time I was into going downtown to Times Square a lot. We had met in front of the theaters on 42nd. He took me for a soda in the seafood place on 43rd Street, and we ended up going to a friend of his house and makin’ it. I didn’t ask for money at that time—the second time I ran into him I went with him and he and I made it again in the same apartment and then as I was getting dressed I mentioned to him that I usually asked for money and that I didn’t want to in his case but did he think it was possible to give me a few bucks because I was hungry. He said he never picked up hustling kids but sure and threw me a couple of bucks—never saw him again but thought about him as I was growing up—those savage déjà-vu strikes in the center of the heart when there’s that odd recall of a man you have lain down with—where has he gone to?—what changes in the visual sense. Here I am ten years later completely away from that whole intense neon scene of the square—