Close to the Knives (18 page)

“If I had a dollar for health care I'd rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS” says the health-care official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour-long video of people dying on camera because they can't afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can't even remember what this official looked like because I reached in through the tv screen and ripped his face in half and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country. “If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers …” says a politician in Texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the politician was only joking and didn't know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn't think it would hurt his chances for reelection anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I'm carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg and there's a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I'm waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blow darts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government health-care officials or those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs there's a thin line a very thin line between the inside and the outside and I've been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on peoples' lips; the religious types outside st. Patrick's cathedral shouting to the men and women in the gay parade, “You won't be here next year—you'll get AIDS and die ha ha …” and the areas of the u.s.a. where it is possible to murder a man and when brought to trial one only has to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free and the difficulties that a bunch of republican senators have in albany with supporting an antiviolence bill that includes “sexual orientation” as a category of crime victims there's a thin line a very thin line and as each T-cell disappears from my body it's replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into nonviolent resistance but that focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack america america america seems to understand and accept murder as a self-defense against those who would murder other people and it's been murder on a daily basis for nine count then nine long years and we're expected to pay taxes to support this public and social murder and we're expected to quietly and politely make house in this windstorm of murder but I say there's certain politicians that had better increase their security forces and there's religious leaders and health-care officials that had better get bigger fucking dogs and higher fucking fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer-bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the inside and the outside is beginning to erode and at the moment I'm a thirty-seven-foot-tall one-thousand-one-hundred-and-seventy-two-pound man inside this six-foot body and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In the following pages, I originally included segments of letters I'd received over the years from the guy named Dakota. They were letters filled with a terrible beauty outlining in words a fierce attempt to experience freedom and that elusive thing we call
life
in all its diversity and variousness. They were letters pertaining to his sexuality in early morning dreams, his desires for a structure of his own choosing, descriptions of standing in tornado winds and rain on the texas plains, baring his body to the elements, scenes of pushing the gas pedal to the floor along abandoned roads in the gulf coast countryside in order to experience the closest thing to flight the human body might possible attain outside of death, and sweet descriptions of melancholy interactions with a dying parent, as well as notes from an asylum that he'd checked himself into in order to detox. The notes from the asylum were chilling stories of families that psychically killed their children in the name of God and Society and Morality. I chose these letters because they were the only surviving pieces of evidence that allowed Dakota to speak on his own behalf about his humanity, his animal grace, his own spirituality. An interpretation of the copyright law brought about by a case (among others) involving J. D. Salinger prevents me from using any of these letters, despite the fact that the last letter I received from Dakota says that I was the only person who ever found use for his creative gestures. In tracking down a member of his family in order to see if I could get permission to use these letters from the legal owners of his estate (in this case, since he died in texas, texas law states that in the absence of a legal will, Dakota's belongings and estate, including the contents of his letters written to others, belong to his surviving parents), I spoke to his brother, who told me that Dakota's life work—his writing, screenplays, drawings, paintings, collages, photographs, and musical recordings—were destroyed by the parents. I was told there was absolutely no chance to get permission from them to publish the letters Dakota had written to me.

I believe that the copyright permissions law is valuable in terms of protection for living people who desire the type of privacy afforded by this law. But I also believe the law is terrible in the event of the death of the letter writer, because it creates a whitewash of personal histories. In the case of Dakota, his entire identity has been murdered by his folks. What fragments of his existence survive, in letters received by friends, are made invisible by the State in the form of this law. Dakota's surviving brother understood something essential about Dakota's life. He offered to write a letter of permission for me, but Texas law makes that letter useless. I would hope that in my recollections of Dakota, as well as the recollections of his friends, some sense of the guy comes through in a benevolent way, as it is very emotional for me to have to participate in the process of denying him a voice by editing from this manuscript his personal words to me.

Names have been changed and in certain instances some composite identities were formed in order to protect the people involved in the following story. Given the hysterical nature of the times we live in, I have taken this precaution.

—D. W. 1991

THE SUICIDE OF A GUY WHO ONCE BUILT AN ELABORATE SHRINE OVER A MOUSE HOLE

Death comes in small doses. Some days this room becomes an architecture of fear when the sun goes down. The night comes down between the buildings and presses itself around the moldings of the windowframes, spreading itself across and through the glass. It becomes thick and textural. What I feel is the momentary shock of realizing that most of the wood, metal and plastic fixtures, the sinks, lampshades, the shower stall, and even the drinking cups will all outlive me if my body follows the progression that this tiny, invisible-to-the-eye virus has initiated. Time reveals itself to be a childlike notion of false structure. The social landscape I have grown to be comforted by is being exploded and is disappearing. There are dozens of faces I hardly know but who have become familiar over time; I have been reassured by the fact that those people are somewhere walking the face of the earth, pushing air around and
thinking
. Each one of them is a receptable for some belief or projection of beliefs and each one of them carries a piece of myself; and in the last month each time I pick up the phone it is to learn that another of them has died. Piece by piece the landscape is eroding and in its place I am building a monument made of fragments of love and hate, sadness and feelings of murder. This monument serves as a shrine where innocence is slowly having its belly slit open, its heart removed, its eyes plucked out, its tongue severed, its fingers broken, its legs torn off. At the base of this shrine I place the various elements that define each person who has died or is dying.

It becomes too much after a while. Seeing so much death, hearing of so much death,
feeling
so much loss. I wondered recently if I was becoming numb to the idea of death itself. What was in the mid-eighties a recognition of loss so profound upon hearing about the first person I knew who had just died of AIDS, has slowly become so familiar that I wince upon hearing that someone new has died and then tuck it somewhere in my psyche and try and refocus my thoughts to something simple like paying the rent or buying the food for my evening meal. A month ago someone called from out of state to inform me that a guy I knew from ten years ago had died. I'd had a fight with this guy and thought he was an asshole up until the moment when I'd heard he was ill. He then become perfectly human in my eyes. I'd been comforted seeing him on the street since then; something about his being alive and occupying space meant that my life was not threatened by this virus. Now he's dead and I feel more vulnerable, like I'm standing on a conveyor belt leading into an enormous killing machine.

There is one homely queen I used to see years ago on the streets of the west village on nights when I was on the prowl. He had coke bottle thick glasses and long straggly hair. Sometimes he was alone, sometimes on the arm of a tough-looking street hustler or borderline homeless type. Our eyes have met for twelve years and we have never spoken a word, not even a nod, but we have had whole conversations in that brief contact. I have always been amazed at his regal bearing and the enormous sense of intelligence that lay in his eyes, the rest of him buried under that cultivated surface of salvation army cast-offs. In the last few years I have taken comfort when rounding a corner east or west and suddenly coming upon this familiar stranger and seeing that he'd changed very little; he was still looking healthy in the midst of a terrible epidemic. There was the familiar rosy flush of his cheeks and the same searching movements of his eyes behind the now-yellowing lenses of his eyeglasses, and each time I'd seen him since the mid-eighties I'd think: “Good for you—you're still around, still alive, still healthy.”

Yesterday I was walking down first avenue and was crossing the street from one corner to the next when I came upon him walking in the opposite direction. I saw him at the last second just as our bodies passed among turning cars and the first thing I recognized were his eyes, only now they were wild with misery and panic and it was only then that I realized his face and neck were blurred with Kaposi lesions like a school of burgundy-colored fish upturning around the contours of his jaw.

My heart is a vacuum of horror; I want to run amok but I am too civilized. Instead I lay his thick yellowing glasses at the shrine in the back of my head and buy some take-out soup from the counter in the nearby restaurant, surrounded by this unbelievable noise made by the living and the unconscious with various silverware against plates and bowls, and I think of what a shit planet this is these days. I think about the seven other people I know who have died this month from AIDS. I think of one guy in particular who was a junkie for years and who ran every scam imaginable on his friends, and all his past routines and games and delusions have become charming because they all boil down to survival and survival is such a lovely thing, such a transient thing.

Why does this one die and that one not? What does all this mean? How do I map all this down? I respect just about every attempt at survival I witness these days. But every person will eventually lose his struggle just as I will one day, and that makes each attempt more filled with life; that means sadness at the loss, but more sweetness in the attempts. That means maybe fewer hours on the face of this disorderly planet, but less shit I'll have to deal with and anyway here I am in the back seat of this taxicab waiting for the light to turn green so that I can arrive at my home, because I feel too sick to walk or wait for a bus and isn't it lovely this pattern of sunlight drifting through the side window across the back of my hand, laying at rest on my thigh. Isn't it beautiful, the fact that I can
see
this light? One day I won't. One day you won't either. Sometimes I watch the leaders of this country on television and think, at least “nature” will reach where assassins are unable to tread. Maybe they'll die of massive coronaries from all their cannibal banquets, or maybe brain tumors from the radiation in their environment. Education is, and will always be, a generational thing and because of that I lose hope sometimes in the idea that the shape of what we have to live in might change. I have always viewed my friends as checkpoints in a series of motions of resistance to the flood of hyenas in state or religious drag. If we all die off what will happen to those we leave behind who are just this moment being born? I realize that cretins have roamed, and always will roam, this planet, whether I am here or not; there's one born every minute—this is a jarring drift; this perspective makes my heart and soul sway. I want relief from this tired yap yapping of my brain. I wish I could pluck it out and throw it into the corner where it can chatter away while I go out for the evening.

There was a period of time immediately after getting off the streets that I could barely talk. I lived in a halfway house with a group of ex-cons. There was a high rate of recidivism for the guys I hung around with. Someone in the old neighborhood kills a distant cousin; you get a gun and shoot the guy who killed him and then tap into the old family network and take a series of trains to the south—honor is upheld, revenge extracted, and nobody gives a shit in the overloaded law enforcement agencies. I kept going back and hanging around on the streets every chance I could. It was the only place where I felt comfortable and surrounded by people with a similar frame of reference. In the halfway house, guys were provided with the minimal structure of Other World existence: how to do your laundry, how to wash dishes, how to keep a bank account for part of your meager earnings, how to make a bed, how to impress a boss when asking for a janitor job. No one spoke my language except for the hustlers back on 42nd street or the occasional John who'd picked me up for some cash and wild times. I learned how to appear in such a way as to never give an indication of my past when walking through the structures of daily life and work. But in order to not go crazy, I planned robberies of electronics shops in Herald Square and I planned robberies I never committed of banks and some individuals on the streets or at the fund-raising parties given by city politicians for kids in the halfway house. We were invited to upper park avenue co-ops to eat meals with shrunken rich people, sitting at banquet tables attended by servants in uniforms. Hours afterwards I'd be in a midtown hotel bathroom, fucking some businessman in a quiet toilet stall for twenty dollars. Death was a corporate type wearing an oversized death-skull mask and gesticulating at me from the horizon. My fear was based on understanding the social structure that beckoned to me and promised a life of security and support to me if I would just embrace its illusion and lies. If I let this illusion wrap is stinking arms around me I knew I'd suffer a death more terrifying than physical death: an emotional and intellectual strangulation. The life that the man in the grinning death mask waved like a banner from the edge of the horizon was one in an activity that I cared nothing about but one that I would repeat endlessly until the day my teeth fell out, all in order to be able to eat and sleep inside a tiny wood and plaster structure he'd allow me to call: home.