In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  He invited me to his apartment and we went there: a small attic studio with two rooms and a kitchen. There was a tree, a small one, or maybe a large branch, nailed to a board on the floor. It was for a photo he was shooting. He said he was going to add a box of fake snow to it. He said he was using some kids in the series of photos but that it was held up because they had all gone to summer camp and wouldn’t be returning until the next week. On one wall was a photograph by some French man: a group of male and female children mannequins, in the countryside seated at a picnic bench by a bank of trees, some of the kid mannequins half-rising from the benches with wine bottles in their hands and plates of half-eaten food on the table, and some standing nearby looking dazed by their postures. They were all turned or moving towards an enormous wall of flames not more than ten yards away, trees and hills of the countryside stretched out before them and behind the flames. They all looked drunken, like some scene from Brueghel.

  He asked me if I wanted to shower with him and I said yes, and sat down on a nearby couch and began unlacing my ratty sneakers, for a moment embarrassed by them in the dawn light coming from a skylight. He took off his clothes and I was amazed by his tan, a healthy brown band of lighter skin where he had once worn underwear. He turned on the shower and went into another room and I looked at a small photograph of himself in some foreign country on a beach, with a red towel over him, cross-legged, leaning over a book whose one white page he held between his fingers as if in turning, and the sense of him in that photo was even more clear than how I saw him in the park hours before, seated on the railing: that intense sense of completion, of knowing himself and being comfortable with himself, the distances he’d traveled and the life he moved within. Nothing I can really articulate here but it was contained in his posture, his body, his face and fingers.

  In the shower I lifted a bar of soap to his back and began rubbing it with handfuls of water over his smooth skin. He turned around finally and did the same to my back, then turned me around so that I faced him and rubbed the soap over my chest and working down to my belly and he raised my hands in the air and smoothed soap beneath my arms in the hair of my armpits down across my belly and beneath my balls, soaping with one hand and smoothing with the other. Then he took some gel from a bottle of shampoo and eased it into my hair, rubbing with the tips of his fingers and it was a sense I hadn’t felt since I was a kid, too young to recall, of being vulnerable, of placing my body in another’s hands, a sensation that was beyond sex but still very erotic, an emotional sense of relief.

  After the shower we made love, and it was a little awkward for me. I wasn’t sure of everything, of what movements to make, either because I was weary or because I was overwhelmed. And then we slept. Later, hours later, when we woke up, we made love again and then I pulled on my trousers in a semidazed state. Not enough sleep, some sort of warm delirium from all the coasting images of the previous hours. I had a head full of things I wanted to say but couldn’t. I tied my sneakers and left his apartment, walking down the carpeted stairs past curving walls with green printed paper, old and musty but with a sense of unspoken class. Then I was out on the street. It was overcast, which I was grateful for, it felt very easy on the eyes, the city traffic in the afternoon, people standing on street corners, streets filled with cars and buses humming, and even though it was overcast there was some startling nature to the light, everything graphic in detail, a heavy sense of rain in the cool air, and turning a corner to head east and downtown I suddenly smiled, seeing grass stains on my trousers for the first time in years.

  September 21, 1981

  After the bust at Danceteria I seemed to have lost trust in any situation or thing. Everything became groundless, apt to fall apart at any moment, nothing offering security or permanence. It wasn’t just the arrests or the eventual loss of work, but rather a period of time in which I grew tired of all the scenes I’d been involved with. It shows in a lot of my work: some influences, assimilation of trends or contemporary creative stuff, but at the same time I’m always running from those things, letting my work stem from mostly what affects me in my life, a work composed of impulse and desire to hold particular senses at one time, sometimes embracing them and then discarding them.

  Meeting this guy Peter [Hujar]: I was slightly drunk, standing in The Bar on 2nd Avenue, he stared at me and I looked back several times. I guess I wanted him in a strong way, his invitation, a look in the eyes, a feeling of quiet desperation knowing how easily you can hold a person, just wanting that moment to come in time when you have the chance, rather than seeing it slip away in a crowd, glimpsed and then lost. I’d pretty much stopped walking the streets, the coolness of winter and weariness from work in the new club keeping me asleep or lounging and uninterested in walking through the door.

  We went back to his place because I had a dog that barked. In his loft he reached into the darkness of a shelf and retrieved a book of his: portraits of life and death or something similar. I knew it, knew it well, and there was that instant where I’m confronted with the enormous image of a person, image gained from previous contact with them, through their work or through pure association with the idea of them in a meeting, like some rogue on the river to whom all the attachments and ideas of Jean Genet I connect, in whom I can place shadows of fiction in the first minute of meeting and speaking, so that this unknown character can assume the air of islands and prison and mystery, something foul and wonderful at the same time, criminal, loner, drifter. And yet the poor guy could be nothing more than a bank employee slumming in the dangerous air of the river, someone with a collection of stone owls at home, with fancy drapes and a Formica kitchen, a new dishwasher, and lace doilies on antique countertops.

  So working through this took some time, in the eventual meetings with Peter, in a series of days I let the image of his work dissipate and be replaced with who he seemed to be, his words outlined for himself as himself. Almost a disappointment as always, and yet a relief that I wouldn’t be hounded by a head-held image of what I secretly desire in a guy. He actually turned out to be quite human and fallible and because of that, interesting and disturbing. So, he seemed to be going through a series of things that I have been grappling with, but without the hope or sense of living that saves me in my own eyes.

  I’ve showed him much of my work and his response has been one of disinterest or at least of being mostly unaffected by my images. This causes me some sort of extreme discomfort. Last night I left his place after using him in a twenty-second segment of the heroin film that I’ve been making. I left his place and met later with Jesse and Brian, feeling a lot of anger at the state of my own art, feeling that I’m stuck in some sort of limbo with my work, feeling unencouraged, feeling that I’ll never get anywhere with my stuff, as if it is quite meaningless to the people I most want it to have meaning for, feeling that as an artist or person who creates, that I’m basically a failure, that I haven’t reached a sort of state that lets creative action be something that has an independent meaning or is capable of affecting change in anyone other than friends. What does this mean? I simultaneously see the absurdity of this, why would I want to effect change, isn’t that an impossible desire, isn’t change through action? Work, an impossible thing to ask. What is it that I want to change? Maybe I want people to faint at the meaning of my work. What would that be like, fainting through something not like fear or challenge but through a sense of it being so true in this world as an independent existence? This is something I don’t think is possible to define. One of the problems is that I dislike the sense of the work I put out, most of it dealing with aggressive images, images that smack people in the face, assault them, or mirror what disturbs them. I seem to really desire some way to seduce people, make them feel at ease and yet make them renounce all the terrible things of the earth and say: Yes, this is what is true. At one time I just wanted to get people to reexamine their ideas of things or get them to experience what they otherwise would not come in contact with, now it’s run
away by itself and become some intent to change things, which has got to be impossible. I want to be loved for my work, I want people to reel from contact with it, and yet mostly I want them to feel good from it. But the images and scenes I deal with are things of quiet desperation rather than universal beauty, something most people ignore or see as proof of a problematic society or existence.

  So now he has called me up and told me that he has syphilis. I’ve gotten my shot and am in a state of pain and reexamination of all I once held as my life, not because of the shot but because of the weariness of all these daily routines: work, movements, neighborhoods, friends, activities, etc. Also the sense that I’m no longer creating anything, or even further, I’m no longer feeling anything from what I make, wondering if living in a foreign country means any more than continuing to live here, wondering what I could do that would map one’s own life in a way that would mean something other than personal reaction, wanting something more universal. But I continue the only ways I know how, always with looking over my shoulder for that chance to change direction and run, escape, depart.

  [No date]

  Went into the bar on 2nd Avenue after leaving Randy’s house. Stopped in for a beer. Just about a dozen or so characters hanging out in there; it was three in the morning. The bartender leaned over and said hello, asked me where I’d been all weekend, and I told him I’d gone away. He gave me my Bud and I stepped back from the bar, and some guy who I hadn’t noticed sitting in the line of stools among other people turned towards me and said, Where’d ya go, Minnesota? I could hear the faint edge of sarcasm in his voice, but it was friendly enough all the same so I said, Nope, Maine. He was a guy about my own age, tanned, and his face had some remains of a complexion problem, something maybe in his past as a teenager—sweet looking Joe—reminded me of some gas station attendant, some kid on a summer job from out of state. We joked back and forth and he was obviously drunk, trying to say things and stopping midsentence. I stepped back against the wall and guzzled the beer, first one in four days, and was hit instantly by it. After about ten minutes the blond guy stepped back from his stool, tipping over slightly but managing to find a place along the window next to me. He leaned over and asked some nondescript questions, things like where was I from and some other stuff, still cutting his sentences up every now and then. I found it amusing; he wasn’t an unbearable character like most drunks could be, maybe because of his age. He was kind of funny. After a few minutes he asked me if I ever came to this bar to pick up boys and bring them home. I said, Rarely, don’t meet many people I’d wanna bring home. He took mock offense at this and said something in return. I told him I didn’t drink much and he said he drank a lot, nightly. He was a bartender in some straight joint uptown. I touched his chest and said, Doesn’t show though. Well that’s because I don’t drink beer.

  Finally we cut out together and went down along the Bowery towards where he lived. He would give these funny little hop-and-skip jumps into the air, arms up and out like some marionette or person imitating an airplane, several times, almost stumbling to his knees. At one point I said, Gee you sure walk funny, and he smiled and said, Really? Think someone’ll notice? This area ain’t safe for walking around drunk.

  Then he stopped to take a piss behind some Dumpster, in plain view of all the Avenue’s traffic. Hey, he said. Is this all right? Nobody can see me, right? Some huge black wino stumbled by and went over to him trying to hit him up for change.

  Up at his place, some slightly run-down building that he shared with a bunch of other people, he had his own floor. There were two black kittens racing around. We sat on the couch and started kissing slow-like, touching each other here or there, stopping for a cigarette. He was still drunk but was sobering up a bit from fooling around.

  It was almost like a repeat of the guy up in Maine, only more urban, the Bowery alive outside the window with its traffic and muttering winos, inside a house with alley cats chasing each other through the dimly lit room. He was hesitant about getting any further into sex until he finally got up and shut out the lamp, the place went into darkness, just a faint light over the sill coming through the curtains from a streetlamp. We undressed each other and got it on.

  After a while I had come and he was having difficulty. He apologized once saying it was from being drunk but I waved it away and said, That’s okay, you don’t have to come. He said, Yeah, but I want to. Then a second later, Yeah you’re right, it ain’t necessary. I got up after a while of sitting around on the couch and running my hands along his sides, over his chest and face. Got dressed and sat back down next to him. Ya know, he said (we’d made love all that time still in our socks), I got this fantasy of you and me, it’d be great if we, well, I can just see us in high school together, just coming out of practice or somethin’, in the school locker room, boy I’d love to walk in the locker room and see you taking a shower, soaping yourself up all over, just the two of us in there takin’ a shower. I was always embarrassed to take showers in front of the other guys in school. Can you do me a favor, please? Can you go over to that chair and start undressing for me? I’d love to see you getting undressed like this was a locker room or something.

  I said sure. He was lying back in the darkness on the couch, a faint light from the dawn coming in slow over the windowsill illuminating his brown body, the movement of his arms in this faint blue light as he slowly jerked himself off. I went over to where this chair was in the center of the room and lifted one foot up on it and began slowly undoing my laces. I could feel myself in some faraway locker room, in some dusty scene from my own past and the past of others, urban or country, some makeshift setting, a locale made up of images from novels and from real experiences as he murmured them from his place on the couch. The sound of cries in faraway baseball or football fields, kids in hallways, traffic on faraway streets, blue and pink dusks, and the faded green metal lockers from memories. He gave a small gasp from the vicinity of the couch. He was no longer visible, the dawn light behind the curtains having reduced him to shadows.

  [No date]

  Sometime in the evening, getting on kind of late. This is a Thursday night. 2nd Avenue full of people, the kinds of people I never really notice anymore when walking down a street, not quite tourists but something like that (characters like middle-aged couples going into Abe’s delicatessen or off to see some harmless show), lots of these people, nameless, faceless, almost uninteresting. Something about saying that that makes me feel funny. I always thought anyone could interest me, maybe anyone could, but some nights I hardly even look up from the direction I’m going in to see what I’m passing by. Then again sometimes it’s a code of symbols I respond to, a way of gesturing someone has, some criminal element in a stranger’s actions that will cause me to look up and notice them. But safe moderate middle-class movements, clothing, speech, and I’ll continue walking by without a pause.

  I was carrying a book [Tricks] by Renaud Camus, some book written by this Parisian about his encounters in different parts of France and America, anonymous encounters with homosexual men. Was bringing it down the Avenue to Peter Hujar’s place. He’d photographed this guy when he was in Paris and was interested in reading his book. Peter lives in this loft over on Twelfth and Second, a few flights up.* As I neared the building I could see strobic flashes of light issue from the windows every once in a while. He mentioned he would be photographing Ethyl Eichelberger, a drag queen who writes some wonderful songs and has a lovely voice and performs on an accordion and ten-inch heels, tap-dances, too. I had caught her act up at some club uptown the previous Sunday with Peter. She sang some songs about various lovers, a sailor met in a park, amphetamines, etc.

  I got him on the phone from the street below, explained I had the book with me: Hi, Peter. I saw some flashes of light coming from your window, wanted to know if you’re okay. He laughed and said come on up for a second. Upstairs Ethyl was sitting on a chair below some extremely bright floodlamps, huge painted face topped with an enormous wig s
haped like a bundle of laundry. I said hello and gave Peter the book and left. At the door I turned to him and said, It’s gonna be a great decade. Ethyl shouted: I HEARD THAT!!!

  [No date]

  I stopped in at this restaurant down on 2nd Avenue, sat at the counter for a moment and ordered a cup of coffee, feeling kind of warm and happy, the remnants of some dream from that morning still in my head. I’d pushed through something in the dream, the character of myself in the dream had arrived at a realization of how wonderful living was. All this utter seriousness having dropped away from me, I was rushing around in the dream, in some suburban landscape, through alleyways, up around garages and sides of buildings stopping people I hardly knew and telling them how happy I was. At some point I found myself with a Super-8 movie camera in my hand and it was almost nighttime and there were these two kids. I was standing at the edge of a backyard, two kids in cowboy outfits, realistic Stetsons, and pearl-buttoned shirts, setting a huge bonfire on the grass. They rushed back and forth collecting twigs and branches and even a chair, and at one point rushed back to toss them on the flames. I was seeing all this through the viewfinder of the movie camera and recording it. The colors of the flames and the light reflecting against the white wall of the garage were burning first bright oranges and reds, then these phosphorescent blues. One kid turns towards me and runs across the dark grass, becoming a silhouette against the roaring fire, rushing towards me and pulling out this gun, lifting it to the air and the light of the fire or some unseen streetlamp catching it, making it extremely bright, reflective. The look on the kid’s face, movements of his body, like something strangely older than himself, he looked like some thug, some character in a small western town, sitting on a side street staircase, a bottle of wine inside a paper bag, drunk but extremely sharp in attention, beautiful looking but inclined towards violence or tension, a look in his clear eyes that seems foreign and can’t be ignored. The film runs out in the camera at this point and I woke up, at first slightly confused at being in the waking world with hot sunlight flashing through the room each time the morning breeze tossed the curtains up slowly towards the ceiling, then feeling the energy of that happiness experienced in the dream.