In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  So while waiting for the coffee to make its way to the counter, I stepped over to the phone and rang up Jesse. Zoe answered the phone sounding a little wired on something: Ohhh … Hi, David, I’m over at Jesse’s house, I’ve taken four quaaludes and I’m taking nude photographs of Jesse. Are you coming over? I’ll take photographs of you, too …

  I laughed and said I wasn’t sure, I was just sitting down to coffee and she said, Well, I’m hideously depressed and so is Jesse and we’re drowning in each other’s sorrows, but we’re doing art, I’m taking pictures, why don’t you have your coffee and then come over? I said okay and hung up and returned to the counter and sat down. Ten minutes later I headed out and down towards the Bowery, over to 1st Avenue and then left onto Houston Street. Traffic was moving around and against the lights of the Avenues. I could see characters drinking on benches on the traffic islands.

  Walking down Ludlow Street there were some little kids running around a radio playing thumping rap music, something beautiful in the characters hanging out, like summer really had arrived, street sounds like cars bucking over potholes and radio music and soft chatter of men and women on stoops. I went up to Jesse’s place; Jesse left to go into the hallway to take a piss, he was wearing this thin bathrobe. Zoe was inside staggering around, half-turning and moving into my arms hugging me: Do you want a quaalude? No thanks. Do you want something to drink? Nah, I’m okay. Jesse came back in and took off his robe and sat on the bed with his back to the wall; the building was old so the walls were plastered and painted white with some stucco effect, the kind of stucco that you could cut your wrist on if you brushed against the wall carelessly. The television was set on one edge of the bed giving off this luminescent blue light on the sheets, on the smooth surface of Jesse’s chest and belly and legs. Zoe was weaving and staggering, trying to clip a lamp onto a water pipe next to the bed that ran from ceiling to floor. She almost fell backwards a couple of times and Jesse finally helped her. She picked up this long string of tinseled garland and strung it around the bare plaster legs of a mannequin, the bottom half of this store dummy Jesse had probably found somewhere on Orchard Street. She stepped back and Jesse propped the legs by his side and pulled the garland around his shoulders: it was unsettling, the beauty of his eyes in the light of the television and the reflection of the blue light against the garland, his chest smooth and luminous in the shadows. Zoe pulled out her camera and started taking photos saying: Oh yeah … fuck … hold it … hold it … oh. Jesse would move around changing his posture, moving his legs around out of range, watching, taking pictures mentally. At some point Zoe slipped off the bed where she’d been moving around, stumbled a couple of times, and we all laughed. She finished one roll of film and sat down to reload. Jesse got up and lifted up the television in the darkness of the room and crossed the floor with it to place it down against another corner of the room. Just this luminous part of his belly and chest, arms silhouetted, the air around him, the slight haze of smoke from my cigarette turning a seedy blue, a grainy blue …

  I finally asked Zoe for a quaalude and took it and the phone rang. It was Brian calling, he said he was going to come over in a few minutes. While we waited for him Jesse pulled out his tape recorder and picked up a sleazy pulp novel from a nearby chair, something called Hot Hips or Love Is My Business, or some such. He began reading a passage from it: And he took her breast suddenly into his hot mouth and sucked on it till the nipple seemed like it would pop off … Zoe and I started making these moaning sexual sounds in the background as he read, groaning enthusiastically and sucking in our breath and giving out little yips and cries of passion. The drug started hitting me and after the recorder was put down I went into the kitchen for a glass of water or tea or something. Zoe passed by and went into the other room, lay down in the darkness and called for me to come in. She told me to lay down beside her, and I did.

  There was an airlessness in the room, something tight about the space, the distance between walls, the floor was one of those on which you could place a marble and it would begin rolling until it smacked against the wall, something about the time of day, the darkness making the space even smaller, the heat from the spring streets coming in through the window behind the curtains. When Zoe walked on the bed she did so with jouncing steps, she turned in midstride after I had walked in and said, Oh, I’m so fucked up, depressed but I took a bunch of quaaludes, and me and Jesse are taking pictures.

  What are you depressed about? I asked, placing my arm around her shoulder. Oh, everything is fucked up. I wanna save some money, a bunch of money and leave the city, go to Australia or something.

  So why don’t you just save the money? Are you saving any?

  Yeah, she said, Except sometimes I’m bad … She pulled up the white sleeve of her shirt revealing a large extended bluish bruise that started just below the crook of her elbow and ran up her arm five inches. She tapped the bruise several times like one does when they’re fixing to shoot up. I’ve actually been pretty good, I’ve cut down to half the amount of coke I was shooting before.

  Look, I said, hugging her, I don’t understand why you people feel depressed. I’ve been walking around all day feeling extremely happy. I mean there’s so much great stuff in living, there’s so much to see and do and feel great about (I was beginning to disbelieve myself, explaining it, verbalizing it wasn’t the same as feeling it, it was more personal). But I’ve been having these dreams, man, really, these dreams where I’m a little blond boy and I’m in this school, and they want to make me a Nazi. They make me wear these little black leather shorts and they’re chasing me around like they’re real strict …

  Later Jesse came back into the apartment: Zoe’s flipping?

  When she lay down in the other room, I leaned in and said, Are you okay?

  She said, Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. What about you?

  Fine, just fine, I answered.

  Come on in here, she said. Lay down for a minute. I went inside. There were clothes strewn about the floor, slightly illuminated from the bare bulb of the kitchen. I first sat down on the edge of the bed. I knew there was something faintly sexual taking place. I felt like I could see myself. I lay down, stretched out beside her, and one arm was beneath me, I think I took off my glasses, looked at her closely and said, What’s up? knowing somehow what was happening.

  Give me a kiss, she said. I kissed her, and she leaned back a little. Jesse was replaying the tape in the other room, we could hear fragments of sentences, some loose erotic words that sounded false, the moans and breathing Zoe and I had made behind them. Tell me about yourself, she said.

  I started a short laugh. Well, uh …

  No, I mean not where you were born and all that. Tell me what you feel about people, I mean sometimes it seems like you don’t really like some of us … you …

  No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m sometimes distant.

  Yeah, I know. Why?

  Well, sometimes … well … because I have a lot of things that I love and that I respond to, and that I think about and care about and most of the people I meet … most of the people I know, even though I like them and have good times with them, they don’t think about the same things or else they don’t talk about them, share the same concerns about them that I do. Most of the people I run into are very superficial, and because I have this whole area of myself I can’t share or talk about or find someone who feels the same as I do, because of that and because I don’t want to lose that part of myself, I just get distant. I feel so different from most people I know …

  She leaned forward and we kissed again. I let my tongue move across her lips, they were very small and beautiful. I felt amazed at how small she was and I started feeling an erection. I felt slightly unsettled, I hadn’t done anything like this in years and years, part of me was confused at touching her, at the sense of her body which wasn’t anything like bodies I was used to lying against, it was like this whole other series of movements that I wasn’t quite sure of how to
respond to. I was very gentle.

  After a while I stopped and leaned up on one elbow and stared at her. I know, she said, You only like boys …

  No, that’s not it. Well, yeah, no, like I’ve been going with guys for so long, I don’t know what this means. I mean I’m enjoying this, I’m feeling this, but I’m trying to understand it, what it means … ah maybe I’m just thinking too much, I don’t know.

  Well, I’m not into conversion. I just don’t know about you. I mean, when I first saw you at Danceteria, I said to myself, Uh ah, don’t touch that boy. I mean, I figured you were into guys but I wasn’t really sure if that was all …

  Well, I said, I … if I do respond to you, I mean if I could, I just don’t understand what that would mean to us.

  Well, she laughed, it doesn’t mean that you’re my boyfriend or that you’ll be my boyfriend. We started kissing again and at times when I didn’t think about it I would get an erection and then when I thought of her, how I knew her in context of the past year, how I’d always thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, how I saw myself seeing myself lying on a cot with her, with my arms around her, seeing my body in that position, the cool white of her skin in the darkness, the effect of the drugs, I’d start mentally backing off, slight confusion, the sound of the tape in the other room and the hello from the other room, the laughter listening to the tape …

  I leaned back suddenly and said, Maybe we should go out there and join them … She pushed me away suddenly and said, Ah get out of here. You’re just another scared boy. She looked a little angry, continued pushing me away from her, but I wouldn’t let go.

  Leave me alone, go on … don’t touch me, she said.

  Wait a second, I’m just a little nervous. I still don’t know what this means. I mean, you know I’m pretty naïve when it comes to girls.

  She laughed slightly. You know that’s not true. She continued pushing at me, and I started unbuttoning her blouse. Stop it, she said. You don’t have to do anything.

  I know, I said. I just won’t think anymore. I’ll stop thinking, and I passed my tongue over the surface of her breast. And we made a quiet and silent love, and afterwards Jesse came into the room with his robe open and with a slight hard-on and leaned over the two of us, laying across us on the bed saying this almost inaudible Ohh …

  Early in the morning in a coffee shop on 2nd Avenue and 11th Street, this dive coffeehouse where gunshots occasionally ring out and pimp types are murdered, drug stuff, petty gangsters, I’m sitting there in the fluorescent light watching the dawn come up, this strong sunlight over in the trees of the church on the uppermost parts of buildings yet the asphalt street below, the cool stone walls of the cemetery of St. Mark’s Church, everything cool blue like early dawn, a clarity that’s unreal, and these drag queens, three of them lifting their skirts up to the traffic, wind billowing up beneath the skirts, their brown slender arms waving, pulling the skirts almost over their heads, shaking their pantied asses at passing cars, laughing loudly, small shrieks: Oh baby! Lips painted and stretched against white teeth, one guy in the coffee shop, a fat white guy with faded blue tattoos on his huge sagging arms: Lookit them faggots. They get desperate after the sun comes up. One queen comes in assuming this overly feminine posture at the counter, leans towards the fat man: Order me a cup of tea, baby. I’ll be right back. Pats the place on the counter where she wants her tea and walks out, cuts up in the street laughing, fat man says to the Greek behind the counter: A cup of tea, she’ll be right back in … cup of tea, y’hear me? And she comes back in and sips at the tea after pouring a pound of sugar in and a dash of milk and her friend comes in and takes a few sips patting their lips with napkins, first one points to this cute counterman and says, What’s he, Puerto Rican? Says something in Spanish. Naw, says the fat man, Egyptian. Oh, says the drag queen. Oh, I’ve always wanted to take a trip up the Nile.

  I turn to a guy next to me: These characters are great. Yeah, says the guy, except when they get rowdy. Other morning one pissed off a guy and the guy backed his car up and rammed forward, knocking her ten feet into the air. Haven’t seen her around since then …

  *David moved into Peter’s loft after Peter died and lived there until the end of his own life.

  David made very few diary entries between 1980 and 1987. During that time, his career as an artist took off, and he had several solo exhibitions in New York and Europe. As well as making paintings, photographs, and films, he continued to write.

  1984

  January 31, 1984

  In this sleep I was talking to this nice guy about thirty-eight years old with an Arizona Texan weathered face. He was all seriousness and half smiles and I turned away from him at some point realizing I had just walked on the moon and could remember parts of it, the close space of the vacuumed helmet, the sense of this time in my life realizing fully this was me in this suit of skin containing bones muscles blood brains, these are my hands swinging slow and smooth in some gait like a polar bear swinging these legs slow slow slow over gray grainy dusty lunar rocks and the gray-blue light in front of me beneath me stretching into distance I was giddy with my breathing and my chance to walk these scratchy dead plains with all that life, the way one keeps a favorite pebble after a long walk in a foreign countryside because of all the life one injects into it all the pleasures sensations of the body adrift in an environment away from all that drives one crazy …

  He’s just finished interviewing me and a decision’s been made that I and six others will at different times be returned to the moon for a longer number of days. I am excited beyond belief. I feel extremely happy like my whole former life has suddenly dropped off like a glove—not the people I know and care about, just the feelings I carry about myself. I am stopping friends and acquaintances and telling them the news. I run into Steve my brother and tell him and he is disbelieving and then shocked but it changes his sense of me I guess. I am some homosexual living in New York and he’s had some sense of connection with me ’cause of birth from the same body and suddenly here I am going to go to outer space in a vehicle I don’t have to pay for.

  Later there is an odd moment on the top of a staircase in a building when I’ve just gotten a tattoo on my chest of burning buildings and strange dinosaur monsters thrashing around one looking vaguely like an eagle but a very expressionistic tattoo and I look down holding my arms around my belly and seeing it upside down then in a mirror and it looks okay. I’ve let the tattoo guy go to town with his own vision, it ain’t exactly mine. In that odd moment I suddenly realize: This is permanent and there forever and always and never to be removed unless I can dig up the hundreds of dollars to remove it by laser and with the size and scope of this one that would cost prolly about 40,000 bucks. And in that moment of thinking Why the fuck did I get this thing put on my chest—I became aware of the two levels of sight I have always moved on in my life: the primary one neglects all thought of future or past and I move in an excited state through events and choices of movements. The secondary sight usually involves regret, seeing the primary sight as impulsive, stupid and with reverberations of trouble, never realizing implications or consequences until the act is done. Somewhere in here comes the fear of rejection and punishment. Will they allow me to the moon if they realize who I am completely?

  February 1984

  I was meant to be a thief-—growing up I traveled some of those roads for a ways and then backtracked and relearned my possibilities of functioning in a less horrendous way among my peers and neighbors. But the process of self-education lost contact with societal education and now years later I realize I am stranded as if on a barely drifting boat caught in the fog of a body of water in between two lands whose distance I do not know. Drifting so that it’s too late to return to old ways and too little knowledge of communication to go on to new ways. A traveler without a country without a base, the map long ago switched for a piece of paper whose language and charts I cannot understand.

  November 1987
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  November 13, 1987

  DREAM

  I unlock a door of an apartment, it’s a small studio with one partial wall separating the windowed room from the front door hallway. I’m inside without locking the door, wondering if I’ve locked it. I hear a sound of some person as I come in the door. I turn, it’s night. I look toward a wall shielding the front door, no one there. I feel a slight shiver of fear. A bed nearby. This isn’t my apartment. I’ve come through the night streets of a foreign city someplace and someone is allowing me to stay in this room/studio. Tom R.* lives downstairs directly below in an identical studio. Suddenly this guy comes around the wall and pushes me backwards onto the bed. I am pushing him with my arms but he’s too strong and heavy. His silhouette is muscular, but he’s entirely covered in small spots of Kaposi’s cancer. He’s wearing no shirt, he has an almost shaved head. He lowers himself onto me and opens his mouth in some sort of grin, his teeth are rotted and wet, saliva spilling from behind them. He leans close to my face to kiss me, first saying, You would have thought I was sexy and cute if you had seen me before I got ill. I’m upset but I give him a quick kiss so he won’t think I’m rejecting him completely because he has AIDS. I feel sorry for him just briefly, but I push him off me and rush out the door into the hall and staircase. I get downstairs to Tom’s apartment door and push the bell/buzzer wondering if it’s loud and if it’ll alert the guy upstairs as to where I am. A bell rings. I push it again and it no longer works. I’m frightened, start banging. Tom opens the door. Oh god, I tell him. You won’t believe what just happened.