In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  *Tom Rauffenbart, David’s lover since 1986, is the executor of the David Wojnarowicz estate.

  Peter Hujar was diagnosed as suffering from Pneumocystis pneumonia and AIDS on January 3, 1987. He spent the following year undergoing medical treatments. On November 26, 1987, he died of complications accompanying AIDS. Three days later, he was buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County.

  1987 (or thereabouts)

  Peter’s death. On the third night after his death it began to sprinkle rain very light. I had met Kiki Smith at a memorial at St. Mark’s Church for Keith Davis who died in July. His was the first Death I’d ever witnessed. In some odd way, witnessing his death prepared me a bit for Peter’s, though I wasn’t as emotionally connected to him as to Peter.

  I realized Peter was many things to me, or I realize it now. Peter was a teacher of sorts for me, a brother, a father. It was an emotional and spiritual connection such as I never had with my family. Maybe with my sister [Pat], as far as some real and deep connection. I remember her reading a book behind a Jersey gas station—Lee’s gas station, Lee, a handsome man with grease-covered hands and arms, and a cigarette machine where I bought Dad’s Lucky Strikes for 35¢ a pack. She, reading to me and to my brother Steve to calm us. We had run away from one of Dad’s beatings.

  My connection to Peter in this time and space we call daily living … I can’t form words these past few days. Sometimes I think I’ve been drained of emotional content, from weeping or from fear. Have I been holding off full acceptance of his dying by first holding a mane camera—that sweep of his bed, his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with a hint of gauze at the wrist, the color of it like marble, the full sense of it as flesh, the still camera portrait of his amazing feet, his head, his face, his eye, his folded hands. Now maybe I’m holding his death away through impulsive ritual, not any prescribed ritual but driving north on a gray day filled with random spots of rain on a dirty windshield, all those bird nests high in the winter trees, everything rich and wet and black and brown, the serious rich black of his photographs almost wet looking, kicking around the cemetery mud among huge lifeless tractors and the ravines they made strewn with boulders and wet earth talking to Mum first walking around trying to find him. So difficult. I started to laugh nervously—maybe I can’t find you—and this erratic walking, pacing back and forth from his soil, the ground to the car, cigarettes lit, camera taken back for a picture of Neal’s flowers. He loved flowers, months and months of illness and the house filled always with different flowers, some so big and wild they looked not like flowers but like sentient beings, something from lunar slopes or big pick-weed fields or cow hills all wild and scrubby. All erratic movements till I stopped myself, forced myself to contain my movements, walking backward and forward at the same time, realizing in that instant how rattled I was. I was talking to him. I get so amazingly self-conscious talking to him, a thousand thoughts at once, the eye hovering in space inches from the back of my head, myself seeing myself seeing him or the surface of him, of wet tossed earth, and further seeing his spirit, his curled body rising invisible above the ground, his eyes full and seeing him behind, me looking over my shoulder, watching me, looking at the fresh ground where he lies buried. I see white light, fix my eyes to the plowed earth and see a white powerful light like burning magnesium covering the soil, his body in a semicurled position surrounded by white light floating hovering maybe three feet from the ground. I try talking to him, wondering if he knows I’m there. He sees me, I know he sees me. He’s in the wind in the air all around me. He covers fields like a fine mist, he’s in his home in New York City, he’s behind me, it’s wet and cold but I like it, like the way it numbs my fingers, makes them white and red at the knuckles. Cars at the roadside and long valleys and ridges and everything torn up, uprooted, all the wet markings of the earth and the tractors, all these graves freshly developed and those giant wet-leaved bird nests like they’ve been dropped by hands into the crooks of tree limbs and leafless branches. I talk to him, so conscious of being alive and talking to my impressions of him, suspending all disbelief. I know he’s there and I see him, sense him, in the hole down there under that earth’s surface. I sense him without the covering of the pine box, the box no longer exists in my head. It’s not till later that I realize I didn’t see the box just huge wide earth and grass and fields and crowfoot trees and me, my shape in the wet air and clouds like gauze like gray overlapping in fog and I tell him I’m scared and confused and I’m crying and I tell him how much I love him and how much he is to me and I tell him everything in my head, all contradictions, all fear, all love, all alone, and how I don’t want him to stay around, how I wish him love and safety, feelings of warmth and beauty outside language, that I hope he will be helped and make the connections he needs so much, make the connections so that his travel will be quick and sure and that he reaches all that none of us know but instinctively some of us sense is behind that event called death—I start crying. I wish I could just touch your head, put my hands on your head … I’m happy for him, I tell myself at times. I feel so sure of what he’s experiencing that … that nun that rushed into the room flinging open the door with one knock and chattering away about now you/ he accepted the church or god or something in his final days and she’s chattering nervously about some text, chattering some text at me about a man she did not know and all I could feel is helplessness. I think of this guy lying on the bed with outstretched arms, I think how he’s so much further there than this woman and her text, he’s more there than the spoken forms, the words of spirituality. I mean just the essence of death, the whole taboo structure in this culture, the whole mystery of it, the fears and joys of it, the flight it contains, this body of my friend on the bed, this body of my brother, my dad, my emotional link, this body I don’t know, this pure and cutting air, all the thoughts and sensations this death produces in bystanders is more spirituality than any words we or I or she can manufacture. The meaninglessness of words these past few days … I’m standing there trying to talk to him, maybe to give him something in the form of words. If energy disperses and merges with everything around us can it immediately know my thoughts?… So I try to speak, to tell him something maybe helpful in case he’s afraid or confused or needs a tool. I want to talk about light, move towards the light, move towards warmth, but the words tip out of my mouth and immediately I know there’s no meaning to them, to have meaning they have to have necessity, but they haven’t that, I know, he already knows all this. I know he’s beyond it already. It’s maybe me that needs reassurance. I open my mouth to form words to talk, all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, I need some sort of grace, and water flows from my head.

  I step through the slight rain into the area before the doors of St. Mark’s Church. I see candles on a table and figures moving about. I suddenly feel odd, fish out a cigarette, light it in the mist, walk to the shadows near the edge of the overhang, see people I know or don’t know, silhouettes of them passing by through the bars. One waves at me as he enters the church. Finally after a second cigarette I walk into the church, someone touches me from behind, I turn and it’s Kiki and the look on her face makes me start to cry again and we hold each other a long time. Later after the memorial I have this urge to go back to Peter’s. It’s late in the evening, Kiki and I have coffee nearby in a restaurant of stained glass, and it’s the third day, the end of the third day, the papers Lynn Davis gave me say it’s the time for the spirit to leave the body. Peter wanted not to be embalmed, but to be wrapped in cloth and put into a white or plain pine box and buried within twenty-four hours after a Catholic mass. He wanted to have time and no disturbance so his spirit could leave his body uninterfered with, the Tibetan papers said, three days of his spirit wandering, trying to communicate with people, the papers said not to do anything that would disturb the spirit, don’t rush for his money or property. I made a simple altar or shrine on one of the large photograph tables near the
side wall with an enormous beeswax candle, honeycomb we found in a drawer cabinet wrapped round and round.

  I asked Kiki to come back with me and dance. I wanted to show Peter’s spirit some joy, some celebration. Kiki said it was still sprinkling a bit. We turned on a few lights in his place; each time I come a little less of him is there. I spread his photos on the bed—all his childhood history, from a tiny one pressed into a stamped brass frame, almost indistinct, of him at seven or nine years old, I can’t tell, and one of him at fifteen. I think he’s in this rowboat set on the surface of a lake with beautiful summer leaves overhanging from the top of the photo and he is gesturing with his left hand whether to cover his laugh or to wave away the person holding the camera and now looking at the photograph I see it’s a virtual cascade of leaves, pine or oak leaves, all of them tumbling around his shoulders, his other hand on the oar, and it’s a canoe he sits in, naked but for his camper shorts and a laugh and the structure of his interior body pressing through. I first looked at this photo days ago, the day after he died, and thought, How could his mother not love this boy? As I spread some of his history across the surface of the bed, with the candle in the shrine burning, I put on the record Lynn found that we tried to use for his funeral mass—Tomaso Albinoni Adagio, G minor, and Kiki and I tried to waltz. I felt so extremely fraught, self-conscious, trying to follow her simple foot movements, one large step sideways, two small movements of feet, one large again, turn, swing large. Finally we shut all the lights off, started the record again, tried again, at times my whole body disappointingly shut down, all emotions shut down. I wanted to dance so freely but all this stuff of years circling over my shoulder … Finally Kiki let go of my hands and started whirling in the space, I did the same, dizzy from not eating all day, whirling and jumping and driving through the darkness, the window curtains open with the rain roaring through the street in huge sheets and veils across the downstairs theater lights, her body whirling through the room, her bare feet, my bare feet, never any sense of collision but sometimes dizziness exploring the place with music circling loud through the room, streetlamps burning and the rain and the rain and the rain and for a moment everything went loose in my head and I was beaming some kind of joy and I was happy for him happy that he could be seeing this naïve body starting to loosen this man and woman whirling in an invisible flutter of cloth and feet.

  This guy was one of the first people I ever truly trusted, this sense of him as father and brother, my real dad being some heavy alcoholic who was a sailor and hated living whereas I fear living at times. Fear and hate, hate and fear—I don’t know what the difference is other than aggression.

  Started seeing this woman today, started crying when I reached the point of trying to explain how I felt about Peter, what he meant to me. I told her I didn’t want to cry and she asked me why, tears running down my cheeks. Because I feel fake seconds into crying. What does this mean? So, yes, this guy was like a father, but was it really that, because I also saw him as sexual, handsome, beautiful mind, beautiful body, his was similar to mine, even with twenty years’ difference. He could finish my sentences, I say to people, and he could, even though I realize through talking to people that he was such a different person to different people. Some people talk to me about their relationships to me and I feel like I’m listening to a description of a stranger. Who we are and who we are to others—it’s so clear how it varies. All these people carrying small parts of this one man and with some people the parts are similar, with others it’s almost alien to me.

  Today I drove from the appointment onto the West Side Highway through the tunnel to Brooklyn. I wanted to film the beluga whales. These whales are so beautiful. Pale, almost gray-white bodies, streaming through the sun, luminous waters of a giant tank viewed from the side in a darkened building. Peter, Charles, and I went there months ago in his exhaustion and watched them for some time. All the mysteries of the earth and stars are contained in their form and their imagined intellect. I had read a newspaper description with a photo eight months ago that made me weep. A painted newsprint photo, black and white, of a bald thirteen-year-old girl who was in a body of water surrounded by porpoises. Some organization that grants last wishes to dying children was told she wanted to swim with dolphins before she died of cancer. The lovely face she contained in the photo and the idea of animals that embodied such grace and intellect and the gentleness of it all seemed so perfect to me. I think of Peter. I think of these whales. I think of sad innocence in the face of death and the turning of this planet.

  The glass case was emptied of water when I reached the aquarium, four whales were swimming in a recessed shallow pool. Some old woman told me they would fill it on the weekend. I felt disappointed and left right away. The obsession with this film and the order of things—I get confused in these moments about why things don’t work when I want them to. What I want to do is so clear to me—to reflect the beauty of the world. I tend to believe in links with the workings of the world—maybe something spiritual—and when things stop momentarily, when I can’t complete an action, I am confused. My emotions won’t allow a detour or a wait. It’s beliefs like this that kept me alive all these years. And it is in this season that for the first time these beliefs are falling apart. It started with Peter becoming ill.

  1988

  [No date]

  [Notes for exhibition]

  The Futurists thought that the machine was God. Take a walk along any river in any country and one can see that the machine is almost defunct. God is rusting away leaving a fragile shell. Factories are like the shell of an insect that has metamorphosed into an entirely different creature and flown away. But the eggs left behind in the Second World War have yet to hatch, and they have an unseen effect on all that follows.

  [My] paintings sometimes deal with aspects of human technology and their mirrored counterparts in nature. Some combine self-created myth with historical mythic symbols. Printed matter from daily life is used as collage, sometimes in the shape of creatures, and sometimes buried in layers of paint to suggest memory or things considered while viewing associations of information. Food posters which have an encoded meaning of consumption are used as backdrops for information dealing with consumption on a psychic or moral level.

  The photographs are arranged into a series of six groups: Religion, Control, Sex, Language, Time + Money, and Violence.

  [No date]

  THE THING THAT’S IMPORTANT ABOUT MEMORIALS IS THEY BRING A PRIVATE GRIEF OUT OF THE SELF AND MAKE IT A LITTLE MORE PUBLIC WHICH ALLOWS FOR COMMUNICATIVE TRANSITION, PEELS AWAY ISOLATION, BUT THE MEMORIAL IS IN ITSELF STILL AN ACCEPTANCE OF IMMOBILITY, INACTIVITY. TOO MANY TIMES I’VE SEEN THE COMMUNITY BRUSH OFF ITS MEMORIAL CLOTHES, ITS GRIEVING CLOTHES, AND GATHER IN THE CONFINES OF AT LEAST FOUR WALLS AND UTTER WORDS OR SONGS OF BEAUTY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE PASSING OF ONE OF ITS CHILDREN/PARENTS/LOVERS BUT AFTER THE MEMORIAL THEY RETURN HOME AND WAIT FOR THE NEXT PASSING, THE NEXT DEATH. IT’S IMPORTANT TO MARK THAT TIME OR MOMENT OF DEATH. IT’S HEALTHY TO MAKE THE PRIVATE PUBLIC, BUT THE WALLS OF THE ROOM OR CHAPEL ARE THIN AND UNNECESSARY. ONE SIMPLE STEP CAN BRING IT OUT INTO A MORE PUBLIC SPACE. DON’T GIVE ME A MEMORIAL IF I DIE. GIVE ME A DEMONSTRATION.

  In New York on the way to the airport, the cabdriver, a tall aged man who looked somewhat Indian, said he was from Trinidad, lived in New York for twenty years: I like driving, always loved it. You work for no boss, you’re your own boss. Sometimes you wait all day sitting around for a job but you make your own hours and I’m out on the streets when I like, out driving. My grandfather was brought to Trinidad when he was ten years old. Trinidad was British-owned, but we got our independence. In Trinidad there are Chinese and white men and they control most of the businesses: restaurants, stores, airlines, agencies. You know, things like that. They have the money. You have the blacks and Indians, Indians from India. You see, my grandfather in the last century, he was a boy in India and the British men would come through India and they would give the boys what yo
u call candies, we called them sweeties. So the British men would give a boy seven to twelve years old some sweeties and you know the drug in the hospital that makes you sleep for the operation? Well they would put that in the sweeties and my grandfather met a British man in the Nad and the British man gave him some sweeties and he ate it and does not remember anything after that. He wakes up on a ship heading for Trinidad. For a while he is very scared and the British men, they give him something to eat and some clothes and they bring him to Trinidad to plant and cultivate and farm. In India my grandfather was the son of a farmer. The British would learn this about each child and then give them the sweeties and take them away to Trinidad for what knowledge they had in their heads. This happened to many children, and eventually when my grandfather grew up they gave him a little land, a little money, and he continued to live there and he married a black woman from there and they had children. My grandfather died some years ago. When I was twenty-seven I came to New York and I have lived here ever since.