In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  I’m in what seems like a Goodwill store looking over racks of coats trying to find a nice jacket—leather or denim—to trade for this big lumpy coat with hood that Pat & J.P. bought for me for Xmas. I hate the thing, want something lighter and sans hood so I can move without feeling like second grader all puffed up in clumsy coat pushed out the door into the world while everyone else has coats they feel comfortable in. I suddenly realize it’s a police station, all these men on benches being booked and fingerprinted for unknown “crimes.” I go over to a wall rack, pick a coat, a man comes over and hands me a stupid coat with a hood. I say, Naw man I don’t want another coat like that, I hate that kinda shit. Wake up.

  May 31, 1979

  Felt the strangest I’ve ever felt—leaving Paris tomorrow for New York—did a half-ditch attempt at cleaning up the apartment, packing, sorting out memories of all of this. Brian went out in the afternoon to look for a gift for Donna. I sat here in the gray light, sudden downpours, clearing, typing out on a piece of paper a good-bye letter to Jean-Pierre. In the middle of it, kids in the school yard screaming, I broke down swiftly—last week of stunned sense in leaving, all of it came out, wailed over them fuckin’ type keys, flashed on Normandy and night J.P. went back to Paris, me typing the weekend out on paper to avoid emotional scenes in solitude, it happened anyway. Trying to keep the fucking letter simple, telling him over and over what I feel for him as a human being, dog barking at me ’cause I’m crying, later Brian came home with a PARIS scarf for Donna: It’s got a metro map on it so she won’t get lost when she comes. I took off, went to the jardin, walked around for ten minutes or so, felt so displaced, wondering why these fucking experiences come, how important is the growth when it’s gotta come to an end, seeing so suddenly my faults laid bare, how I coulda done it all differently.

  By the time I get it together will things remain the same—wanting to come back to him, how long will it take, basing hopes on future things, doing something as a writer that makes it possible? Am I fooling myself? I ain’t capable of pulling my energy together and being a banker or slick-suit businessman, doing anything flashy for big bucks, just dunno how, don’t wanna know how and yet there’s a big fucking landmass and waterways to get through to even see him again for a long period of time. On metro up to Pigalle saw a guy with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist with a huge prison tattoo of a crucified Christ, done with pins and ink, amazing head with blood pouring out and malformed chest and arms. Pigalle newsstand—major drug scenes/exchanges going on. Toothless hoodlum rushing back and forth. Transvestites waving from third-floor windows at me to come up. I feel rearranged.

  Went with J.P. late in the night to the room on Bourdonnais to drop off some things of his there. I feel kinda weightless like in any such transition period only worse than ever, weightless and sad and removed as if everything was rushing by me. I thought of past scenes, everything flashing as we moved through the streets in the auto, flashes of the sense in which I’ve been involved with him. We got to the room. I had the note that I’d typed out to him alone, with the snake rock I’d done in Normandy, the one I had done for myself. Only thing I could think of to give him as I know he liked it and it represented something important to me/of me that I could hand to him. We unpacked the boxes of food and pots and pans, clothes, kitchen utensils, coffee grinder, etc. I slipped the wrapped stone and letter onto the table. He found it there after a while and looked at me: Is this for me? Yeah, I said and laid out on the bed, the mattress under the window holding a dark sky with no stars. I felt tense and beautiful and vulnerable and sad. I thought of plane crashes and endings, the bloodlessness of my once loving arms, a deep sleep something warm and enveloping to make me forget … I watched his back, his hidden side illuminated in the small wall lamp’s light, he read for a long time, I wondered if he didn’t understand what I had written, if the language was too difficult, he turned finally after slowly folding up the letter, noiselessly and deep in thought, he turned and said, It’s beautiful and it makes me feel strange. We embraced and held each other as strongly as possible. He lifted up his head and looked me in the eyes and said, I never told you how much I love you because I was afraid to make it too heavy. I thought you might one day leave and I didn’t want it to be difficult. I held him and felt such a harsh love for him, a thick fist rising in my heart, he said, You know I’m sad you go back to America, but I’m happy. I’m happy I had the chance to love you for this time. You are … We wept on each other’s shoulders and made a slow love together for the last time, just being with him for those last hours made me feel better, knowing that I would have an hour or so in the morning with him kept me from any kind of craziness.

  June 1, 1979

  Morning we woke together and I made coffee while he shaved. We sat and talked quietly while Brian slept. Talk was difficult as we knew for the first time so clearly where we stood in regards to one another. 9:00 rolled around. He got up to leave and we embraced and I walked him to the elevator and it surged, fucking hot tears coming up from my passioned insides, constricting throat, touched each other’s hands as the elevator door was closing. His face was white. I wept in the bathroom in a towel to cut the noise. Pat and Jean Pillu arrived from Germany. More crying. Realizing how much I love Jean-Pierre, how much I love Pat and how beautiful she’s been towards me. How well she understands my senses at this point especially concerning Jean-Pierre.

  Arrived at Kennedy Airport around 11:30 P.M., got through customs without having to open my bags. A relief. Walking through the building while Brian watched the bags. I passed a bunch of kids, the unsettling subtle violence of New York/America and yet that realization not easing the sense of almost horror at being once again part of the place. Took a sixteen-dollar cab to Brooklyn Heights to Court Street. Standing on the street while cabbie waits and Brian rushes up to one A.M. household to get money for tip, two Brooklyn rowdies walked by shouting jive shit—bebop clatter familiar sounds, big ego in the face of awesome shit of being New Yorkers with bleak chances at life in this society. Almost passed out, felt hot and dizzy and weary and sick of all these huge looming flashbacks into states of past mind, things in the past, attitudes here in America, working for livelihood, the flash lighting of Pizza stand clattering character, dark night over grainy red buildings’ rooftops, the glimmer of the chrome in windows, the Yemen Club sign, the cabbie asking me was I a Yemen: You a refugee? Where’s Yemen? What’s a Yemen?

  Cried awhile when I lay down on the mattress Brian laid out on the floor, lying there, dim lights from tree-filled building, grainy light like a film made of New York traffic Expressway sounds, the smell of the four cats in this apartment (Chuckie’s place), the horrible sense of weariness from over a day’s nonsleep the flight the dislocation from the familiar, all that I’ve come to accept as home and lover and living—realized I needed some sleep, so slept.

  Back in New York, David continued to pursue getting his writing published. Much of the journal writing at this time chronicles his sexual experiences on the Westside piers. He started making work using photography and drawing.

  June 5–August 28, 1979

  June 6, 1979

  Brian and I went over to the West Village. So many things to write about, the immediate visual effect of the West Village after nine months in Paris/Normandy. First off (in Dennis’s words) it was like an outdoor whorehouse. It’s fine to be in a whorehouse when you want to go with a whore but ya don’t wanna live in a whorehouse. Now days later, after those first effects I feel a bit more comfortable. Don’t think I’ll ever forget that initial sense of shock.

  Later we walked on down to the Bank Street Pier after stopping in a groceria near 8th Street and getting a couple of containers of carryout coffee. Walked along the West Side Highway structure, roaring autos and grainy darkness, filthy streets with the tugboat strike, a few transvestites out hooking in the shadows of the girder stanchions, a black well-dressed dude pulling down the window of his lit Cadillac as some trans-hooker leans over with a
side smile to talk business. Walked out onto the darkened pier, lights on the Jersey shore, the sound of traffic receding at our backs into a shushed roar like faraway ocean or the sense of sound when you’re in a bus on a highway and the lid’s closing: sound moves around and is heard at a distance. Sat on the end of the pier, the flashes of memories actions scenes past, remembered giving Brian a back rub here one night or was it vice versa? Some guy giving another a blow job on the side strip of the pier. Gave Brian a massage, drank from our coffee containers, talked loosely but mainly laid back in the calm of the night, the moving Hudson River at our backs and sides. Some kinda security as in removal, movements of lights coiling and fracturing on the dark surface of the water, looking back through the darkness towards the skyline, Empire State Building, shafts of illuminated sides of darkened windows, spheres of luminous streetlamps, barely illuminated water tanks, the moon half full and blazing out there in its loneliness: some kind of barometer of the senses depending on time and distance you feel. Normandy moon has a clear foreign sense. New York City moon not so remote and wondrous.

  Later heading back we walked along the highway, the motorheads from the cycle bars spilling out in beery crowd onto the streets. Musclemen packed into tight T-shirts and this one albino kid about nineteen or twenty flirting with some of them as he walked in front of us. A group of ten transvestites sitting on car hoods or standing by the sides of gleaming autos, fixing their faces, powdering noses, rubbing on lipsticks and showing each other their clothes, bending down into car mirrors to work with cosmetics. Couple of more reserved joes hanging out with them staring around and looking a bit faded.

  Earlier when we went into Tiffany’s, a new New York dive restaurant, who was sitting at the counter but the stripper from Paris I talked to in the Tuileries. Blew me away, in fact wish it hadn’t happened. Strong wounded senses came up. Thought of Paris and all that I left behind. Disorienting, to say the least. He and I exchanged hellos, he thanked me for writing the letter for him to the strip joint in order to work there again. They took him back. I couldn’t say very much to him; it was like all this energy of Paris and the life there: the relationship with Jean-Pierre and all my conflicting desires to return to New York or remain there, my desire now to go back and forget about America (the difficulty in that, especially with my intense love for western landscapes and for friends like Brian). I sat down after mumbling a loose good-bye and dug into some horrible cherry pie and coffee with Brian who was laughing sympathetically, saying, That happens to me all the time.

  July 6, 1979

  Esther’s cousin fell through again; I’d woken up late in the afternoon and talked with Brian after he called Jo-Jo about it. John H. came over in the evening just in time for some hot spaghetti and cheesecake that Brian fixed up and afterwards Brian stayed to do the Edwin story and John and I took the train into Manhattan, I was decked out in my black pants and tuxedo jacket and guerrilla T-shirt and engineer black boots, same thing I had worn at Hurrah’s but sans the grease in the hair. We got off in the Village and walked around the streets a bit, I made a couple phone calls to Dirk but he wasn’t home, we walked down Christopher Street in the night, crowds of bar characters, homeless cowboys and street sleepers, the roughneck crowds and the junkies on the stoop next to Boots & Saddles and the dollah joints ooo-eee good shit here now dollar joints, mesc, etc., etc. Passed the Silver Dollar with the semitransvestites primping in the side mirrors, day-old leather guys lounging in plastic seats and across tables, pointed the joint out to John as the place that was my usual stomping grounds during the Willy Street period, bands of transvestite gangsters and sleepless days and my head dropped down on greasy slick counter at odd moments in the night till the surreal roar of garbage truck dawn creeping up and that was when the joint changed from sleaze scenes into somethin’ like pre-Montana truck stop dives on the faraway road, truck drivers roar up pumpin’ brakes and shakin’ heads wired with beauties and sliding sideways into the Silver Dollar to seat themselves before plates of steamin’ eggs and ham and steaks and cast questioning looks around cluttered tables, at the stragglers from last night’s motion … every so often this fat queen dancer would tip the bucket and go outta her gourd and wave a small pistol around and wanna shoot up her cheatin’ “husband” endin’ up in some rat dusty dive behind the door in the eight-by-twelve-foot room weepin’ in the soiled mattress and waitin’ for him to show his face in the door so she could shoot it up … that was a blow to our robbery plans, no one else we knew with enough class to own a gun …

  Turned the corner at Badlands bar and walked uptown, racing night traffic and glitter of lamps and glass broken on the street and the tittering of transvestites in front of Peter Rabbit bar and the ocean roll of traffic and hiss of wheels the shooosh of bypassing autos and the glimmer of the river not too far away—we crossed and took various pisses and sat on the waterfront board walk and watched the characters easing in and outta the shadows of the pier warehouses, along the brick walls like rats and emerging into the phosphorescent shine of bathing streetlamps along the lapping posted walls through various darkness and passing no one—once inside it was difficult to see, a few dim shapes of white T-shirts or the pale gleam of white skin in the darkness, and standin’ still for a while our eyes adjusted and we walked toward the back of the pier warehouse where there was one middle doorway shining with a contained section of river and lights, we passed back, John said it was hard to see the ground, we moved directly in the center of the doorway line, seeing two bright spherical yellow lights like car headlights anchored on Jersey cliffs sending vertical lines of light, gold breathin’ light across the surface of the dark rolling river, like two railroad track lines laid out into some hobo’s heaven, what was that song: Bring me to that place where beef stews grow on bushes, where whiskey trickles from mountain rocks, lemme get that last train, last train (some song from depression hobo repertoire), jokin’ to John that it’s a giant Chevy parked against the Jersey coastline, images come from the river, the solitude and great sense of foreign remote excitement, all road images coming back from distant places and watchin’ these ferryboat barge ships drift by with loud echoing rollin’ music coming from their stompin’ interiors, part party people on a late-night drift, we turned and walked back in the deep darkness of the pier warehouse and stood against a side wall talking quietly and watching the movements of anonymous characters driftin’ back and forth and up and down staircases against the back wall, occasional voices from upstairs and then we strolled back out and onto the bank street pier and towards the end of the pier, avoiding the large gaping holes that open onto the river, my foot almost disappeared down a large pipe aperture, over to the side materializing in the darkness were two men, one giving the other a desperate blow job, Jesus, I said, and John went, Whew … and further on were two men one bent over getting rammed by another guy, the fucking was brutal and fast and almost violent but both were into it and then at one point the guy getting rammed was rammed so hard he flew over and his palms landed on the surface of the pier boards and he continued in that position and I just recalled that before in the warehouse we were upstairs walkin’ around through hallways and rooms and there was this guy who slid outta the dark and had his shirt removed and positioned himself on the wall and then slid after us as we moved along, he rushin’ from door to door and leaning back to caress his chest and crotch and I asked John would he mind waitin’ a little bit to the side in the main large room, he did and I went in after the guy, he turned from the wall and ran his tongue over his lips, could feel the dryness of them just by lookin’, he whipped out this bottle of amyl and held it under my nose and groped me and I rubbed his chest, his nipples, and he moaned in that hollow darkness, held the amyl under my nose and I placed my hand behind his neck to draw him down to his knees but he turned and slipped away into the darkness and disappeared—I went back to John and we split into a series of rooms windows bordering the river and four perfect diamonds of exterior lamplights laid out on the
floor, if ya stand in the middle of the side doorway and walk forward the doorframe empty of door evolves into another room with diamonds of gold light with shadows crossing window frames into another doorway you’re still moving forward it’s like a film, another set of diamonds on another floor, and the tips of each set of light diamonds appearing less and less in each room, easin’ into full view as ya pass forward, eyes on one spot in the unseeing distance, moving like you’re on rails—everything relegated to the senses, use of sense like a vehicle, moving forward at regulated pace, something otherwise so unexplainable yet the wounding nature of these visual scenes … we watched on the bankstreet pier the fucking until the guys separated and went their various ways, we sat on the far edge next to lapping water and posts and talked about the sense ya get in these scenes that although it’s public sex ya still have the sense that ya should respect their privacy and not go over and watch, though watching from a discreet distance can only be expected as it is an intense visual to be confronted with and then another boat went by with characters milling and shoutin’ in the din of music, you could barely make out their voices—and the timeless photographical nature of the scenes way back at the beginning of the pier, the trucks lined up silver and motionless, the numerous autos from Jersey and other parts all filled with motionless drivers waiting for someone of their private dreams to walk along softly and open the side door with a click and slide heavy and denimed into the front seat and the pale flash of belly and the motion of the tongue and the slide of hands and the sleeplessness of it all, the bright lights and lampposts burning continuously beneath the Westside Highway structures, the trucks barreling downtown and the two smokestacks to the side in a factory building, squealing autos and the light pale rise of smoke … John said as he turned to me that in the pier he experienced some intense excitement, sexual excitement as I did and that in all his fantasies in regards to making love with a guy, maybe not all his fantasies, but in the culmination of them he wanted to make love to me and I felt speechless and yeah felt the pitch of excitement and the newness of it, the whole surrounding sense of making it with a friend I’ve known for years and traveled with thousands and thousands of miles across the continent and rode freights with in airy Montana mornings, hitchhiking through rolling corn and wheatfields of that Minnesota evening, just at dusk and the bobbing of road lines from stoned vehicles of our past and then it’s funny how memory gets the better of us at times and rearranges all events and distorts senses in a way as to clear out things and make room for the important sensory scenes, no, John didn’t say all that just yet, we were still getting out of the pier we walked back along the highway towards Christopher Street, against a doorway were five transvestites all yakkin’ away done up in their personal glories with makeup and low-cut blouses and silicone shots or hormone tits and John was awed that they were really transvestites and we walked up the stretch of Christopher Street, stopped in the Silver Dollar and ordered coffee and Cokes and toasted English muffins and I called Dirk five times all the time busy on the phone and after that we walked up over to Tenth Street and rang his buzzer and he let us in. A historical moment I proclaimed to them both after getting stoned on some strong weed of John’s and Dirk said, What, and I said, Hell, to finally get you two in one room, John as soon as he got there made a dive towards the record collection and started speedily pulling out albums and puttin’ them on the side and Dirk stood back and watched everything—Dirk was in a low-key energy but after a half hour was zoomin’ right in there, we all got wired on the smoke and Dirk ran through his slides, lotta new ones in there among the ones I saw recently most being time-exposure stuff with televisions waved around in the dark and then flash added to the final fixture of a scene, shots of Suicide and Jackie Curtis and others, the weed was potent and Dirk played sections of records, some L.A. bands and some eastern bands and he and John yakked high-speed about various musics and musicians and their tribe from the no-wave circuits and Dirk on James Chance: He gets us impatient with our impatience for freedom, gets us to feel and gets seized by our impatience for freedom by doing exactly what he wants to do, Sorta Nietzschean, said John … listening to PIL’s reggae sounds, and the discussion ensued of the quality of the stuff, the ideas of Johnny Lydon creative abilities and flashback to my and John’s conversation the other day on the breakup of new no-wave bands and the fact that they appear so fast that there’s no disappointment when a breakup occurs ’cause the members of the band that were really putting together stuff will go on and re-form bands and nothing gets stale, the whole idea of no wave being one in which staleness should never will never occur, and if it does occur then it’s a defeat …