In the Shadow of the American Dream (35 page)

I had to piss and went to an old bathroom, mostly metal stalls and shadows like the subway station toilets of my childhood. You could sense sex as soon as you walked in. I went into a stall and big sections of the divider were peeled away to allow for sex. A young guy in his late teens or early twenties was jerking off watching me. I jerked off and he bent and leaned through the partition to blow me but I covered the head of my dick and let him lick my balls instead. I reached through the hole to touch his chest but he backed away to clean up. I was so happy to have seen Phil. Woke up.

*
David went on his cross-country book tour by car, though he was getting symptomatic at this time. Hoping for inspiration to write again, he planned to drive alone through the desert. At the last minute, he decided to go with a friend, Marion, with whom he had a complicated, sometimes charismatic relationship.

*
Peter Hujar was diagnosed in January 1987; Tom Rauffenbart tested positive for HIV in December 1987, and David followed a few months later.

August 1, 1991

I've pretty much isolated myself from almost all the people I know, especially since the last two months when I was so fucking ill—constant nausea, head pains, unable to shit for weeks at a time feeling that my system is poisoning me and having bone biopsy, intestinal biopsy, and blood work and doing all them drugs that don't do shit for me. For a while I was injecting myself with interferon, now I'm on steroids. They made me feel a boost for a week or so but now I have trouble shitting again, fevers 101-102°, nausea all day, on some days head pains again. I'm sick of being sick and it aggravates me to speak to people who have a degree of normalcy in their lives. I hate it when someone calls and I tell them I am sick and they go off on this mundane bullshit about what they had for breakfast or what their kid is doing or whatever. That drives me insane. I can't tell if it's just their denial or their humanity. Humans obviously can never fathom what suffering feels like; there's a block in the brain that prevents it. Maybe we'd be so filled with horror we'd throw ourselves in front of automobiles. But it's all exhausting. I see that the relentlessness of my illness is boring for others, yet I'm the one who's fucking enduring this shit and at times I
have
to verbalize it despite other's fear of hearing it. So, that's why I isolate myself. I can't deal with another, But you look good. It's not affecting me too much in how I look, but it's hell in how I feel, the quality of my life sliding down to the point that I haven't worked on hardly anything for nine months.

I just hate people sometimes. I'm sick of feeling like a fucking empty Xerox version of my former self. Myself of last year is gone, is totally away in the past, floating like a rag in the wind. I'm blank, I'm a copy of my features. I look similar to a year ago but that sense of living, of fantasies, of hope, of purpose, of need, all of it's gone. I'm empty in regards to what used to touch me. I have no fantasies, even sex is a blank for me other than recognizing beautiful gestures or bodies: my kind of beauty. It's a bore to think about sex or try to jerk off, my body just doesn't give a shit. People, even when I explain some of this, tend to just yak away about their lives or say, Why don't you go away, take a trip, do something fun?… They don't know what they're talking about. There is no fun. Being sick in a hotel in the woods is worse than being sick in a familiar bed. I've lost the faint degree of hope I always mustered inside of drift or fantasies. None of it works anymore. So what, right? It's just what it is and nothing I say or do can touch it. Nothing anyone else says or does can touch it. I'm empty, other than of illness and dark thoughts. I want to die but I don't want to die. There's no answer right now.

This psychiatrist called me at the bidding of a friend. We talked for about forty minutes. He asked me about my sexual activities, my depression, my background a bit, and other things (health). I was candid. He wanted to know if I had been into S/M. I was surprised at the question. I told him of my few experiences and how I realized with low tolerance to pain I wasn't into it. Sometimes a slap on the butt in fucking was interesting, but the mechanics of pain were not what I was after. When Peter died I had two experiences, placing myself into the hands of a sadist I met in a movie house. My memories of it are complicated. Kind of makes me ill. It hurt a lot and emotionally it shook me up to the event of death in my face. Or something like that. Anyway I stopped after a couple of times and thought for a long time about what I wanted. I guess with the most important guy in my life dying, and I remember feeling I could never live by myself or go through this world without him (Peter), I guess I wanted to lose control as completely as possible. I mean this guy, this sadist, had me tied to the four corners of a bed and he sat on my chest and said, You are completely in my hands, in my control, right? Yeah, I said. I can do anything to you and you couldn't stop me. I nodded. Answer me, he said. Yes, I said. Okay, he said, untying parts of my body in order to lift my legs up to swipe at my butt a few times with a belt. It just hurt too much. Later when he left, I took a long hot bath in Epsom salts and wished I would die and leave everything/ everyone behind. I was tired.

Anyway, I'll see this psychic next week. Who knows, maybe I can release some of my state of mind and get some relief. Death is nothing more than relief. That's what informs my desire to die when I feel most strongly about suicide. I'll give this guy a handful of sessions and see where it goes. I feel interested to try but also somewhere in my head I wonder at whether another human can actually touch me deeply as I seem to need at this point in my life.

Except for phone logs and lists of things to do, this seems to be the last diary entry. In December 1991, David got sick and was hospitalized for one month. He was bedridden until July 22, 1992, when he died in his loft on Second Avenue and Twelfth Street
.

About the Author

David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1954, and first gained notice in New York's East Village art scene in the 1970s. He rose to fame for his exceptional range, intelligence, and passion, and by the 1980s had become one of the most provocative artists of his generation. In the years before his death in 1992 from AIDS-related complications, he worked tirelessly as an AIDS activist and anticensorship advocate.

In 1985, Wojnarowicz brought his fight for freedom of expression to the case of David Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, in which Donald E. Wildmon claimed that Wojnarowicz's work was pornographic and undermined family values. Wojnarowicz won and was awarded a symbolic dollar. He was thrust back into the spotlight in 2010, at the center of a censorship battle over the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
. In 2012, Cynthia Carr published the critically acclaimed biography
Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 1999 by the estate of David Wojnarowicz

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

Cover image © 2014 Andreas Sterzing (David Wojnarowicz, 1983)

ISBN: 978-1-4804-8960-8

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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