In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  Hey Dave, he said. Gosh it’s been a long time. How are ya? He still has his heavy metal haircut, jet black, feathered down his face and neck. He talks kinda funny though. I wonder if he’s still a crack addict. How you doin’? I asked him, fishing for words. Fine since I found Jesus, and he smiled. When his lips peeled back they revealed a cage around his teeth, an obscene structure of miniature fencing and steel tubes and silver caps and deep blood bruises for gums. What happened? Oh I got hit by a car riding my bike, wired up my jaw but Jesus is in my life. I just pray, you should try it. He loves us all. The guy he was with was nodding out on the corner. God bless ya, Dave.

  It’s an enormous white wall about the size of a football field standing upright on its goal made of rough bleached stone. There are only two windows way at the top. One double window on single right next to it inches away. Both black with tinted glass in the slight fog. Rich people live there; they see sights the rest of us don’t see. The news for them is and will continue to be good. They are very proud of their armies halfway around the world and the work they are doing. They are proud of themselves for how they have edited their view, their lives, their neighbors, us down below. They hear very little of our lives, they hear little of our hollers our screams our hunger our choking. They usually avert their eyes from below, they can look at any hour of the day into my room, my single room in this cheap hotel. They might see me naked reclining on my bed watching patriotism on every station on the dial. They have faith in god and country and concrete and steel and limited numbers of windows usually high up where no gymnastics or ladders can reach. I could close my curtains but I want them to struggle with the intrusion of their view. Nakedness is a difficult thing for anyone to ignore. We load it with symbols which have meanings our lives supply. My nakedness shows my hunger. My image can go where my voice would falter and dissipate. The rich have shades on their three windows, long black slats of designer materials. Two slats on the smaller window are parted maybe permanently. They may be at home, they may be away, it doesn’t matter. I have all the time in the world. I experiment with small explosives and crude brand-name missiles temporarily made from stove matches tinfoil and now small steel cups. There are seven or eight spots on the white wall that look like attempts at spin art. They are my previous attempts. I’m getting better. I think of the smoke I will one day see pouring like death petals from those three windows. I think of the rich hanging over the balcony, the windowsills. I think of their full bellies. I think of their useless bank accounts. I think of their armies, their soldiers occupied halfway around the world. I do things in my bed that I imagine would appear rude and without taste to them if they were home and looking downwards for a change. I wave periodically.

  GUY ON POLK STREET

  He looked like a cigarette cowboy who had gotten into a bad accident in the last year. Like he’d been delivered a terrible blow from the rear, something so massive and total it was like he was hit with a machete the size of a refrigerator. The result pushed his skeleton so it rested just beneath the skin on the front of his body. The eyes were the only things that remained where they originally were—way back there. His body language recalled rodeos and steer herding but was more like clichés now, like old John Wayne movies. He had no great lines (words) spill from his lips like before commercial breaks. His eyes were advertisements for early death which probably no one would notice. His death would spark and sputter like a malfunction of a halogen light.

  KID ON MARKET STREET

  He reminded me of those wolf children they find in remote jungles or forests of India and bring snarling and spitting to one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages where he will refuse to eat, walk on curled knuckles, and sleep in a dark corner on a small rug as opposed to the downy mattress, tortured by halogen lights and media crews. He will die within the year.

  [No date]

  When did the hard rain fall as predicted twenty-odd years ago? What language can we invent to replace that term rooted as it is in historical mythologies and dead-end media, fadeaways and blackouts? The war is close to an end interrupted by commercials for painkillers and rash creams. I’m in a cold wet city that is gasping for water in the worst way in its history and yet water makes some people miserable, the ones huddled in barely recessed doors around City Hall under wet sleeping bags. It recently became illegal to be homeless in this area after the civic center and stock exchange and department stores close up at night. Forget the “hard rain”—it takes so many forms whether carpets of bombs or the choking silence of people’s invisibility. We starve or watch people starve—politely we turn channels on people’s lives or deaths. We step out of their reach into autos and planes and luxuries too boring to list. A man pulled out an enormous black dick and stuck it through two heavy red velvet curtains at me and I sat with my back to it. The usher for this moist disintegrating movie house discovered him and shone a flashlight in his face until he fled into the rain. The guy with the dick should have been given a medal. It was such a lousy film and I felt an emptiness as wide as the missing sun. A kid of fourteen pressed his forehead against the glass separating us as I ate a small meal that has woken me up six hours later. If I am nauseous is it permissible to lay responsibility on the world and its movement? It feels something like car sickness only larger. The kid has a wet bundle of worldly possessions and he’s looking for at the very least a hungry mouth more hungry than his own so that he can bargain. Forty Iraqi troops surrendered in the desert to a marine drone, a very small pilotless plane armed only with a video camera. My body has feet, my hands feel helpless, weary or useless when confronting the future of all this. The whole world is going on at a distance or maybe it’s me who is at a distance or maybe it’s me who is in the distance watching it grind to a creaking halt. How do you describe emptiness without using words? Making sound disrupts that emptiness but it isn’t that easy because at some point you have to stop to breathe.

  Trying to remember states of mind when I was seventeen. I’d bought a bus ticket to Ohio I think or maybe it was to the furthest state line in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t matter because America had already passed the loan, destroyed itself like a self-destructive or suicidal amoeba, this was when everything was reformed and rebuilt to look the same in order to ease people’s fears of foreignness and to induce them to travel without having to risk making new choices. I sat way in the back of the barely empty bus, the rest of the passengers clustered like flies behind the driver. He was sexy. I could see his face for the entire ride in the large rearview mirror. I pulled out my dick and wrote poems in my head for hours. I had a hard-on for 300 miles.

  It’s so odd trying to write about the past based on memory: the landscape and human particulars fall to the odd logic of time and emotional impression. The landscape of memory is as affected by time and personal structure as is landscape affected by light or darkness. At night when sources of light are curtailed, shaped, bent, deflected, erased, the distances can suddenly be elongated or shortened, physicality of self or landscape expands or contracts in the dark. 8th Avenue in memory can be a location or landscape no one else has ever traveled.

  [No date]

  Having this virus and watching guys having sex and ignoring the invitation to join in is like walking in between raindrops.

  [No date]

  AIDS IS NOT ABOUT DEATH. IT IS ABOUT PEOPLE LIVING WITH AIDS. This is bullshit. I understand the concerns about media and how it has manipulated images of this virus which can affect public perceptions and funding for research and health care. But AIDS is not just asymptomatic muscle boys and kick-boxing dykes leading the public fight against this virus. Those of us dealing with manifestations of this virus need room to embrace and look at the very real possibility of Death. Having seen many friends go through horrifying illness and die, having fevers and night sweats for the last two months, feeling horrible and fragmented, I demand that we don’t slip into denial about Death as an aspect of AIDS.

  In the paper today I read a story about a woman
in an animal park who tried to stop a fight between two 5,500 lb. elephants. She died. Phil kept saying there’s something in the paper that was hysterical. I tried to find it. The first story I read was the elephant story: “She loved elephants too much.”

  [No date]

  So I get on the plane and everyone looks like a Kennedy and some weird excessively aggressive man sits next to me across the aisle. It’s an empty plane but he’s thrashing around slamming overhead doors throwing his seat belt out of the way to sit down and generally looking like he’s in a rage. I imagined him a hijacker. I imagined my death at his hands or his death at mine. I must be anxious. What is all this? My hands are so sensitive, my whole body is so wound up I feel again like I want to puke or scream. I wish I was rid of this body. I wish I could leap out of this skin and run away or explode or disintegrate. I can’t stand the feeling of air let alone my clothes against my skin. I have these images in my head of ripping out my veins my nerves my skeleton. People are so weird, so unconscious. The waitress is giving us pretzels with too much salt, a ginger ale that tastes like benzene. The agitated man says an obvious prayer. Will his prayer keep the plane from plummeting? I make a decision that I don’t have anything or anyone to pray to. I wonder if that means I am the only one who won’t survive a crash. More Americans than ever believe in the Archdiocese version of Hell. Even Protestants. That’s funny until translated into politics, into research for AIDS, into funds for starving people in those concentration camps we politely refer to as ghettos. There goes my brain again—

  So I’m supposed to leave for a round-the-country car trip to do readings for Random House.* I must be crazy but I can’t bring myself to cancel the trip. It’s like some Disney pill where I’ll magically regain all my energy—physical and mental—to make a driving trip like years ago when my body was preinfection. That life will stretch like a blank screen of sky on the horizon to be filled with all my desires, articulated or not. I still want to puke. I’ve been feeling this way all week I think from the penicillin. Yes, from the penicillin. Otherwise I have to think it’s something new growing in size in order to kill me.

  [No date]

  I think I got kicked by a tiny mule in my sleep. Got that bone marrow biopsy. All I can remember is the sunlight. Lying on a doctor’s table while she is pulling from trays all forms of equipment, rustlings of sanitized packing clink clunk of tools and a wave of late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the thin blinds across the walls, counters, and her moving white-clothed body. I tried to think what it was about sunlight. What I was always drawn to comment on to myself yet never have anything to say about it other than its presence or lack of presence.

  I have a horrible streak of that discomfort sensation around my neck, the fear of touch, the anxious nausea of having the cloth of my T-shirt having contact with my skin. The doctor is going on about her business not turning around finally she asks me to turn over lower my underwear and she probes my lower back, my hip, and selects a spot. Invasive procedures scare the shit out of me, actually it’s not so much fear as revulsion at the idea of marriage between body and machine and horror at it being me who all my life lived in fear of a rough death by exclusion, isolation, starvation, homelessness, untreated illness. Something about a steel tube pushing into my flesh and further into my bone and clipping a piece of that bone. It’s an issue of privacy in the worst sense. I have never in my life thought of my bone marrow except in the idea of giving it to others who need it. But that’s been abstract, that was more about sadness and needing to fulfill someone’s desperate needs, to break their physical isolation. Like my intestines are extremely private, so are my bones, the marrow inside them. I’m embarrassed at having someone accompany me in moments like this. My body feels like a third person in the room, my mind a second person, my friend a first person, the doctor absolutely necessary. I’m self-conscious for my body. I’m still in disbelief at my condition walking into these invasive tests like a man under a spell having horror but propelling my body forward despite it, a slight sense of maybe losing myself forever down a road that leads to endless illness and suffering and eventually a shutdown of my body as in death. Like in a time tunnel that telescopes and contracts life and civilization outside its transparent sides going on at an excruciatingly slow speed, slow in purpose, slow in awareness or ignorance.

  It’s done, not so painful but excessive in horror. She lays the little 1 2/3-inch length of extracted marrow onto a large glass slide. It’s pinkish with blood and looks fibrous like the texture of gristle. It immediately looks like marrow even though I’ve never seen it before, its qualities are in magnification even though I’m two feet away and it’s immediately identifiable as marrow. With a lot of effort she slices it in half with a scalpel, it will travel in two directions for different tests. Cutting it in two creates a sound against glass, a sound, a grittiness. So tiny but powerful. Next day I’m still in specific pain, manageable but still a thread of nausea and horror.

  I’m thinking, I’m here. This is the chair, the bed, the shelf, the television, the lamp. I’m still here. Isolation is preferable even if I feel I’m dying of loneliness and of this thing in my blood. Being out helps for a moment but the whirl of fear and need and the pressure to decipher it all and not know what it is, causes me to want to go back into isolation—At least the bed won’t disappear, the television won’t die even though it is essentially death.

  I’ve been depressed for years and tears since Peter died and Tom’s diagnosis and my own diagnosis.* When I was younger I could frame out a sense of possibility or hope, abstract as it was, given my life felt like shit. I’ve lost that ability. Too much surrounds me in terms of fears, attempts to confront others and myself for clarity, to confront death or illness or loss of mobility or my brain rotting or shrinking, the recent loss of mobility in that I am too terrified to go long distances for fear of death or illness in unfamiliar environs. Knowing I’ve been depressed, realizing the extent recently makes it all more confusing because I don’t know, I can’t separate what in my fatigue and exhaustion and illness is from depression, what is from disease. One feeds on another until I want to scream.

  When Peter talked for months about something feeling wrong, feeling like he was underwater, some acquaintances of his, one a shrink, said it was classic signs of a depressed immune system. She was stupid.

  It’s A.M. in Bakersfield. I think this is the town/tiny city where some cop got shot in an onion field and then they made a movie that made millions of dollars. San Francisco for a couple of days—odd thing to be in a city after Death Valley. Doing the reading [Outwrite panel] and its aftermath was heavy. I mean the people whom I spoke to and the heaviness of their private lives—One guy started to cry and said something of his lover home in bed ill and another guy had to cancel his trip to Europe to go the next day to get an operation on his eye for CMV retinitis. What a fucking horror. There were others, all of it made me sad around the end of the night.

  One guy showed up that shocked me. In 1985 I came through San Francisco and tried to look up a guy who worked part-time at the desk of the YMCA I had lived in. He was long gone. He was a guy I was friends with along with a whole cast of eccentric characters at sleazy Embarcadero hotels. We’d all meet at this coffee shop and talk all night. Richard was the most stable. Anyway, he showed up looking great and said he still had all my letters (I was twenty-one) and little notes and drawings I’d sent him back then. Then he was gone.

  Amy was great. Something about her. When I first met her and subsequently I felt those old feelings of instant deep connection like you recognize someone you once knew a long time ago. But you really know nothing. So what is all this? She’s beautiful and sexy and smart. Those words are stupid because it’s all something much deeper than that. If she were a guy I’d maybe marry her. It’s some emotional trust even though I don’t know from where—

  Another fight. I’m sick of this. Marion and me going through heavy times in Bakersfield. I arrive at a feeling tha
t I want to cut off and go for a while by myself but then we’re stuck in this town, this car, this hotel room, etc. We were driving all day. In the morning before we left San Francisco, she called Amy and asked her to join us for breakfast and for some reason I didn’t say no when she asked me if this was all right. The night before at the reading and then the candlelight march for AIDS I felt happy to see Amy and when I went back to the hotel I wanted it to stop there, not see her again until next time, whenever that is. But in the A.M. I figured if Marion wants to see her there’s a connection there and she deserves to. But then she started torturing me with the possibility of taking photos of Amy and me. I had been sitting at a restaurant in the Phoenix Hotel, dozens of people around the morning before, and she began taking pictures of me and I told her it made me uncomfortable. She didn’t stop. It makes me crazy to have someone photograph me in public. Always has. I hate being photographed in general and the only rare times I have felt okay was when I was comfortable, when I felt a bond or trust between me and another person and we had privacy, sometimes in a group of people if those people were all friends or friendly.