In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  So anyway Marion starts telling me she is going to photograph me and Amy at breakfast and I start getting uncomfortable and tell her she can’t take pictures of me and a tension grows. She says I make her feel like a paparazzi. I tell her I don’t like to be uncomfortable having my photo taken in a public place. She says she’ll just photograph Amy. Fine, I say. I was tense all through breakfast, which read as having fun by Marion as she told me later. So I can mask my tension. I don’t think so. I figure anyone can see my tension but Marion says she didn’t. I was glad when breakfast was over. I just wanted to get out of San Francisco, maybe back to the desert just driving barren roads all the empty sky like a sponge or in worse times like an enormous mirror to tiny things and circuits like emotions.

  So in San Francisco, I went to a porno movie house and jerked off. It felt kinda stupid and human. An Asian guy sat next to me, was putting his hands all over me. I was lost in the darkness of the seats. I felt a little weird. You know, having the virus and feeling like my body is filled with the virus and having a strange kid playing with my arms and chest and a straight porno on the screen whirring away in the dark and feeling like I’m sitting miles away watching myself in all this.

  I told Marion afterwards, told her the intimate details of the physical stuff and all the complicated things going on in my mind as well. In the end the whole experience went from casual, where I thought, So what, to seeing it as vaguely interesting or that maybe it was good to have a sexual moment since it’s rare that I do something sexual. It’s been months since jerking off. Maybe twice in three months. Some switch fell off months ago maybe while I was feeling so sick. I couldn’t give a shit about sex. It seemed stupid and boring, at times the idea of it, the complications of it made me think: nausea.

  But in the course of telling her the story it all changed emotionally by degrees and by the end I was sad and feeling a little jittery. The kid wanted to suck my dick but I wouldn’t let him. He kept trying in the most ridiculous ways but I kept refusing silently, just with hand gestures or by grabbing the back of his neck and pulling him away. He finally said, Why not? I said, It’s not a good thing to do. It makes me nervous.

  I couldn’t talk about AIDS. I just wouldn’t let him do it. He wrestled with my fingers, slapping my hand as if to knock it out of the way. There was something sweet and sad about it.

  When I tell Marion intimate things like this experience I have sometimes weird feelings about speaking candidly about details but then I tell myself that she makes no judgment and why should I feel odd speaking about details of sexual contact? I push myself to open the book I guess to show trust or what I believe is a trust between us. I don’t know what trust is if I try and look at it closely. I always look into a physical/mental communication expecting to see a physical shape as if trust were a physical shape and it is not. It’s invisible and it is delicate and it balances like a thin wire suspended between two points.

  We were driving in the evening in Bakersfield trying to find a place to eat. It’s all industrial prairie where we were. Then suddenly suburbs and a small highway. She was talking about travel in Marrakech and getting picked up by two guys, French men. She was young and they all drank together. She was attracted to one of them and figured they’d fuck that evening. When she got to the part about the hotel room and smoking pot and then having sex with them she suddenly stopped and said, Oh I can’t tell you that. It was a point of intimate detail, some memory of rawness and drunken high bawdiness I guess, and I said, Oh come on, you have to tell me. I tell you the details of my experiences. She said, No No No, laughing. I felt upset suddenly. Like a moment where something takes place and you suddenly have a view of how someone sees you and it’s so far away from how you grew to believe they saw you. For me it was a shock. I felt something like emotional betrayal, like a laboratory specimen who’d been under examination in intimate detail by someone. Regret. I wished I could take back what I’d given because it was a constructed trust that I suddenly felt was based on a nonexistent foundation. Or that somehow the foundation was all my projection based on misinterpreted signs or gestures. I told her I would never again talk about intimate details of certain experiences if she couldn’t tell me about hers. I felt emotional in this. Hurt. I wanted her to hear me. It was a flurry of emotions and it swept into the moving car.

  It’s moments like this that I wish I were a thousand miles into a remote place, unreachable and untouchable, devoid of humans, closing the walls around me to all people, speaking to the emptiness of the landscape or to the tiny workings of the world like bugs and animals and wind flowing and movements and shiftings of sand and sky. It drives me crazy not to be alone in these moments and for the rest of the evening it was that insufferable silence and weight: two people with two reactive versions of what events translate into. She said the fact I pushed her to speak of the details made her suddenly freeze and unable to remember or that she needed time or something. This was in the moment she’d been laughing and saying no to my prodding. Then she had a reaction to my being upset.

  We went to this stupid steak house in the middle of a dead street and it was so hetero-inspired: crushed velvet walls with lumber, stained and burned, nailed all over the walls in fake western fashion, a handful of drunks at the tiny bar, and remote waitresses who could see we were outsiders. And a few tables of large families, moms and dads and kids. Everyone knew each other. And there we were in dead silence, like a fucking gloom cloud surrounding the table. If anyone wondered who we were or what our relationship was, it would have looked like two accidental strangers sitting at a table as if by all accounts of gestures and movements and sippings and chewing and casting our eyes about the ugly room that neither of us was visible to the other.

  Those are moments I want to disappear, be in a car in the evening flooring the gas pedal, coasting into the unknown and nothingness of the desert or small cities, to be anonymous and unaccountable to anything or anyone. The only responsibilities are gas in the car, food in my belly, and movement to ease all that I carry. Let the vehicle, the sounds of night and trucks and the tiny movements of light distract me from my own humanity, my own body as long as I’m not sick, as long as I have freedom for my body, as long as I have my hand on the steering wheel, then I can drift and drift and even in extreme weariness I can prevent myself from stopping, driving into exhaustion, letting the mind chatter or die, whichever road it takes in the midst of all these thoughts. This is the problem with making plans that extend into the future with others. It’s an almost futile gesture because it assumes a shape and structure in emptiness. It builds a psychic house that can elongate into what has never happened and to trust it is to be surprised by its arrival or to be darkened by its failure. At moments I wish to be alone but it’s too complicated and I’m disgusted by the fact that I can’t disappear and that all of this remains so constant.

  Three junkies on TV followed by a cameraman as they work daily as thieves and live with women who are pregnant and whom one of them beats viciously on camera—The violent one eventually gets put away in jail for longer and longer periods of time because of violent activities inside jail. Fifty rules and he has broken at least half of them. I’m glad for his fuckedup wife. There’s something sick about watching people disintegrate on evening television and yet it is compelling enough to be unable to stop or turn the channel or leave the room. It’s like having an eyeball that hovers in space in the rooms of other people’s lives, which are always fascinating even when it’s mundane.

  I also understand perfectly that it was a moment for Marion when she may have crossed a line emotionally and suddenly was self-conscious in the same ways I am in revealing intimate details of sexuality, the point where I calm myself with the absurdity of the world and push on. She simply got hung up and I told her I’m not really interested in pushing her to go on and tell me what took place between these two guys and her body, I really wasn’t. I don’t have a need for those details but if I hear or witness them I simply add them
to the construction of the world, to humanity itself and all its complications and forget it. For me it wasn’t the information but the moment of what felt to me like trust broken. Not just that, but feeling another’s gaze as being not what I believed it was. My emotional reaction was betrayal and regret, stupid as that may look at a later date. I felt like either I was a stranger or she was a stranger in that moment. It could be a child’s thoughts, it could be. But it’s there and I felt a door closing between us, not a door that covered all of our experiences but the complicated part of us that compelled me to open up and turn on a light to illuminate a tiny part of myself and my complicated movements.

  I’m speaking of my sexuality in all its varied forms in the thousands of minute turnings of the brain and its body vehicle, the pathos, the sad lonely gestures between humans, strangers, in order to switch off the outside world. All my life I have almost never spoken of these moments, all my life I carried these deep in my belly. I never fucked people in a social community. I always had sex with strangers outside that social community except for four relationships, half of them brief. I did this because of complex feelings of people who constantly verbalized and measured publicly others’ sexual leanings. I told Marion that I hated the idea of people approaching me because they heard I fucked a certain way or that my dick was a certain size or any of that. I guess it relates to years as a hustler and wanting never to go back to that sensation of being meat or object unless it was a mutual desire.

  Anyway, where am I? Sitting in a Days Inn in Bakersfield with oil pumps down the road swinging like enormous black insects ramming oil from the deep parts of the earth. She and I are at a stalemate. I asked her at dinner if we could let all this go and she said no. I explained to her where I was and she explained where she was. I told her that the sex information wasn’t important to me, it was the moment that I described earlier. I felt it was all clear—uncomfortable but at least expressed. When she said she couldn’t let it go I felt exhausted and a little angry that it was going to take over the evening, which it did, and as we lay in our separate beds I wanted to be alone for hours days months years, whatever. In the worst of it I thought how stupid that I break my isolation and yet I know my years of isolation were both painful as well as a time of need, that I learned something essential in that isolation but that it had a destructive quality to it and it made being in the world more difficult at times. So here we are. I couldn’t bear to go to Death Valley with this stuff in the air. I would feel very angry to do that, to play a vacation routine and feel she could separate and do what she wanted while I felt like darkness. She has that ability. The only time I have that ability is if I separate and have endless time in front of me. I told her I couldn’t go. That we should head back to New Mexico, stay in cheap hotels so that if the days were heavy, the costs would be low. To spend a bunch of money in a miserable environment would aggravate it all for me. I feel responsible because she has no car or anything and who knows how much money. But I refuse to be the chauffeur in a miserable voyage. I just can’t do it. I need for myself to have some quiet days free of tension or at least as free of tension as is possible at this point. I have to go back to NYC and go into experimental drug treatments in Boston. I have to have blood taken every two days for a month and a half. It’s gonna be a complicated season. Summer is hell.

  When she was coming with me, all my thoughts were based in old memories of the exciting times, the intense communications that ran deep between us. Years ago we were almost inseparable. Others were jealous of us because there was a great sense of reality between two people that outlined something of the soul, previous travelers who recognize each other in the cloak of strangers. Two strangers who know each other intimately and instantly upon meeting. Maybe that’s why it breaks so powerfully. But this time has been different. I can recognize what I loved in her in the past but something has changed. I look at her in odd moments and realize what a great human being she is, but I see her in the distance. Always. And I try to understand the sensation and keep thinking it has to do with my mortality, my slow death, my depressions in the last couple years. It feels like it keeps boiling down to my sense of mortality, the sense that no one else can touch something essential in me. Whatever she or others can touch in me, no matter how deep or rare, there is still a place, a form, an area below that that has grown in time and is untouchable. Their fingers are not long enough. No, that’s stupid. Their perceptions and references could never grow long enough. She can’t conceive of what I see or sense or carry other than that which everyone is capable of perceiving if they have the guts or energy. This is something different, special, unwanted on my part, undesired, hated at times, this view of my death, this slow separation from the physical disintegration.

  I never feel sad when I see a dead skunk in the road the way I feel about other forms of life: birds cats dogs small mammals snakes lizards. Maybe it’s because the stench of its death is so powerful it overwhelms me with the reality of its death. It stays with me for miles. So it marked the event of its death in such a way so that one cannot ignore its life. And the ending of that life. I need to think more about this.

  I called the desk and told them we’d stay a second night. I told her I couldn’t make a decision of what to do. Not with a half hour remaining before checkout. I’d told her this morning that I wouldn’t go to Death Valley and pay the money for an expensive hotel room surrounded by isolation going through the motions of two of us traveling with heavy shit suspended in the air. It’s something uncomfortable in me. I suspect she can detach enough to enjoy herself while I can’t. I want to be removed, to locate something of a distraction, but to be in a motel with all the evidence of her presence and to have to move in a series of motions and constantly deny the heavy air for myself—I won’t participate in that.

  Later she said she would separate from me if it was what I decided and that I should sit with her and plan out the bus routes back to Albuquerque. It’s all blank desert out there, buses may not ever go where she wants. I felt stuck. I don’t have the energy to plan her trip, to plan the disintegration of this one. What is this? I just can’t. I would feel angry to do this. I feel like I’m standing in the distance watching this accelerate and grow and implode and yet it seems stupid, what it’s all based on. It feels like neither of us will move it to free us up. Like I said, I see it from a distance and it’s sad and strange and it hurts, but I lay back on the strange arms of all this and think that, well, life hurts and life is sad and will all this when it’s over provoke a radical thing inside me? Will it end something that never really got started?

  When in the past we were together it was so strong. I feel it’s me who’s changed and not because I wanted to. Something essential has turned and I wasn’t aware of it. It’s revealing itself in a way that I can’t explain, but I sense it in everything. It boils down to that thing, that form, that location that’s grown inside of me in isolation and in the fields of time and aging and death, inside all the physical loss in the last couple of years, the last four years really, starting with Peter Hujar’s death.

  You know, it’s funny, if I try to describe how someone has touched me so deeply, the process of language fails me. It’s like I never examined it close enough to build words around it, around the taste and smell of communication, the blood of it in my heart.

  I kept waiting for the switch to be thrown, the close-up recognition that she and I had resumed what we dropped two years ago. It never came. I saw nothing but echoes of the past, but the distance was always present. It’s seeing the familiar but consistently standing outside of it, never feeling that needed sensation of it enveloping you, surrounding you, becoming something you can lie down in without thought. I guess that got to me. It gave me a little spark of anxiety that I couldn’t speak of. To speak of it would make it more real and I don’t know what the results would have been. Maybe that’s just my fear. Finding no reason for a state to exist. Wondering why certain motions are in play when the foundation h
as disappeared and nothing is in sight to suggest reason or therefore meaning.

  I rode past the oil derricks and blank dusty fields of the town. Trucks and autos and mean-looking workers. Fires billowing inexplicably on the sides of houses and trailers and sometimes an entire backyard in smoky flames. From the outside looking in. Came back to the hotel room and she’s gone. Her bags still here. This makes me depressed. I keep feeling that it’s her decision to make if we split because I can’t make that decision. I do know that I won’t participate in the state that it’s in now. I don’t think things are bad enough to split but I refuse to go through formalities of a vacation in order to give her what she needs. I’d rather be alone and feeling dark as all hell than to be with someone in a way that makes me feel even lonelier. This morning I was incapable of making any decision in what happens to her and me.

  This afternoon sucks. I’d told her before I left that if she chooses to split that she should check out the bus schedules and go her way. She later picked up the telephone book and that’s when I left and went for a directionless drive. I won’t sit in the room and listen to her make plans for the final moments of being together. Am I weird? I just don’t like that pain. I still have two legs and a possibility of mobility. Remove myself from the probes of discomfort. It’s probably just as fucked up either way but I can distract myself for moments at a time in the drive. A guy with no shirt picking up pipes and refuse in a field near the highway: no feeling in me really, just a spark of recognition in what used to produce desire. But it pulls me away from myself for a split second.