Close to the Knives (19 page)

I did what I could to pull away from the certain demise I'd been facing on the street and at the same time threw myself into situations that suggested a possibility of looking into the eye of death which was disguised in a more attractive form. I crawled through the walls of every social taboo I could come across. I wanted to celebrate everything we are denied through structure of laws or physical force. I just did it quietly and anonymously. As a homosexual in america I couldn't openly explore my expressions of loving. Expressions of loving are never an acceptable thing publicly in this society—even straight loving, let alone homosexuality. Just look at television. We can look at the latest body count in close-up and yet the human body is still taboo. So if I couldn't express my sexuality I could at least subvert it within forms of violence which could pass through the streets without resistance. The circle of friends I interacted with publicly shifted and was replaced over and over until one day the violence of my street life finally arrived at a point where it was indistinguishable from aspects of my public social life. The vietnam war and its daily tv displays of faces numbed with horror, the repeats of slow-motion videos of burst flesh and dead babies and ravaged exploding villages, slowly came to an end. I saw photographs of necklaces of human fingers and ears. I saw album pictures of guys my own age standing in a field littered with human heads. I saw the caved-in faces of people whose skulls had been literally popped out of their heads by mortar fragments, looking like obscene balloons left over from a distant celebration. The youth of the urban centers of america, as well as their dislocated counterparts in the suburbs, began slowly warming up for a dance of social death by first quietly and then publicly tracing all the outlines of taboo and violent activities and forms of nihilism they came across. They began to push everything they could to see how far they could go before they exploded it, or it exploded them. By the time these activities went public, nobody outside of those social activities seemed to notice, or maybe they thought that by having bought the illusion of security, or having money and food, it wouldn't touch them. Maybe it was that the violence they'd witnessed on television during wartime had gotten completely confused with the seductive commercials that surrounded those images. I felt the whole landscape surrounded by media faces expounding how normal things were and how thoroughly wonderful life in america was and how well we all were doing and yet all my friends were doing a death dance in front of these surreal propped-up facades: little jerking physical movements suggesting suffocation in the asphalt streets of slums and imploding neighborhoods. Whole neighborhoods of youth entered a period of superficial communication masked in the black clothes of mourning. Most of them were in their early twenties and in a nation gone numb they didn't want people to know who they were or how sensitive they were and how much they suffered. Drugging gave them the salve for the schizophrenic nightmare they were living in and literally gave their brains a television quality of unconsciousness so that they could survive a walk from one side of town to the other. The people in power knew their own physical deaths were well within striking range, so they cared about nothing more than strengthening their secret accounts and their control forces and the height of their security fences. They invested more in the design of manipulative sound-bites than they did in any form of moral food and social answers.

For a period of time I entered a circle of people who were attracted to forms and expressions of violence and bloodletting because these things contained some unarguable truth when viewed or experienced against a backdrop of america. In a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president, a country where fewer than half of those eligible to vote even bother to do so—and when they do they elect for two terms a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them—in this context, violence presents a truth that can't be distorted like words and images. Living in america during the Reagan years had the same disorientation as a texture dream; that sense you get at times lying with your face against the sheets with your eye open, millimeters away from the microscopic weave of the linen, and suddenly your body freezes up and your eye is locked into the universe of textures and threads and weaves, and for an extended moment you can't shake yourself from the hallucination. Instead of a piece of linen, it was a television set in the corner of the room and on the tv was a series of carefully choreographed gestures, winks, fake warm smiles, hand motions, and feigned deafness beneath the roar of helicopter blades. The criminal tidbit that Nixon got booted out of office for was a joke in comparison to the Iran-Contra affair alone. During the Reagan years, outright starvation or murder by assassination of the competition or opposition became public and commonplace, yet an entire country was plugged into an accelerated decomposition of the bogus morality america had come to define as its purpose for existence, and almost nobody blinked. And it was televised. And it continues.

It became a time in which one had to choose one's tribe; choose one's
reality
. Some of us felt like the incredible shrinking man on the late night television movie; he realized that no matter how small he shrinks (how invisible to the eye of government he becomes), he is still alive, just his environmental references have changed. It is the moment where you understand the con that you bought by being born into this pre-invented existence and speaking your first word in imitation of your family, how that word supports and continues a structure that is basically about death of the soul, of the emotion and the intellect. Sure, one could practice voting and maybe rearrange a few of the threads, but in the end it is just the same old fabric covering the pillow that covers one's face. An act of violence spoke with an implicit truth. Drugs provided a psychic rearrangement of a physical landscape that is totally owned by white people with money, power and all methods of communication and control. We understood the message from our elected representatives in government: who could go for the ride and who couldn't. Some of us chose our own transportation, some of us got on the national roller coaster to hell our own way. As the ride through the 1980s came to an end, we look around and realize that some of us are still surviving while others fell to the wayside along the route. The television still blinks out its increasingly accelerating display of the variousness of the con routine—the sawdust pouring out of Reagan's head on the landscape of television did nothing to wake very many people up, and thus we have a former cia director as our current death god. The streets have become our sacrificial temples, with millions of homeless and millions more entering that status. What form will the death dance take in the next decade?

“This is life—let's swim in it.”—(dream conversation)

One night I ate a bunch of mushrooms and walked out into the psychedelic streets and headed uptown to see Johnny. He lived in a building up on third avenue that would be the first building in new york to fall if an earthquake struck the city. It swayed in the breeze and like most people's apartments it had floors that slanted at extreme angles. In ten minutes' time I was beginning to feel amphibian-like; my arms felt twice as long as they should have and I kept trying to stuff my hands in my pockets so that no one else would notice. It took me an hour to find my way through the thick paranoid atmosphere of the Jell-O streets and traffic to the front door of his building. It was a trip through the fun house. I kicked the front door until it cracked open on its bent hinges and a swarm of particles rushed at me: the smell of sushi gone bad mixing with a scattering of grime and dust like billions of tiny demons came screaming through the yellowing haze of cheap fluorescent hall lights, flying into my nostrils and face. It was a topsy-turvy mix of darknesses and lights which gradually formed the vague outlines of hallways and rickety staircases. He lived four flights up. On the second floor I interrupted a sale of dope between the resident dealer and a white boy with pimply face and biceps. The dealer was a skeletal apparition that forever stood in the shadowy depths of the darkened hallway, and every time I visited the building he made me for the heat and would spin aroung pocketing the dope and mutter something about how he's tired from walking up the stiars and just in the hall taking a breather blah blah blah. The next flight up reveals a short huge-bellied middle-aged guy leaning across the hallway windowsill with his head over the traffic. He had an operation the year before and they took out one of his lungs and leaning over the sill on a beach towel was the only way he could stop the sense of suffocation, so this was his prime activity for eighteen hours a day. I thought of beached whales as he breathed-wheezed hello, at my passing to get to the next flight. Standing next to him in the shadows is this prematurely-aged alcoholic woman whose boyfriend is in rikers prison and whose kids are sometimes referred to as the demon kids; they're up the next flight of stairs heading towards Johnny's place. They stop mid-flight and break into a rap routine and attempt to break-dance on the staircase. They're ten and eleven years old and usually found sitting on or around Jimmy's easy chair. They come up so they can smoke Jimmy's cigarettes when he's out in the streets foraging. Jimmy is the guy who lives in the hallway outside Johnnys' front door; he's got the chair and a radio and an ashtray stand and some current hardcover novel he's been reading and he's a sweet guy. Jimmy stopped drinking recently and was almost stabbed to death by his best friend not long ago. Five days after getting out of the hospital he let his best friend sleep with him in the hallway because he had no other place to go and the kids in the building woke him up saying: “Now's your chance Jimmy—he's asleep. You can cut his throat while you got the chance.” Jimmy said sweetly: “No no he's my best friend, I can't do that.” The demon kids plop down in his easy chair, big enough for both of them, and light up one of his cigarettes. They have the eyes of forty-year-olds. Downstairs their mom screams: “COME DOWN HERE THIS MINUTE BOTH OF YOU.” The kids ask: “For what?” and the mom goes: “WHATTAYA MEAN, FOR WHAT—IT'S CHRISTMAS—THAT'S WHAT. NOW GET DOWN HERE,” and the kids hop up and down in the slimy july heat saying: “Oh goody—it's christmas, it's christmas!” and I wearily reach the front door of Johnny's place and bang bang bang bang he's not home.

I met Johnny in a rock and roll bar where he was a bartender and I was a busboy. It was a club that traded on the memory of Chubby Checker and was run by the sleazy grade-B-level mafia. The creeps that counted the money also managed some of the hustler bars on eighth avenue and one or two of the drag queen bars in the times square area. For minimum wage I had to pick up bottles and puking drunks off the floor as well as unload hot merchandise from the backs of hastily driven midnight trucks. I unloaded stolen computers and various weird cargo and lived on the tips the bartenders kindly threw my way.

Johnny was a geneticist at a respected uptown laboratory. He also put out a xerox magazine called
MURDER
, which concerned itself solely with murder. It contained found clippings from newspapers, photographs of both real and staged murders, drawings of mayhem such as Elmer Fudd standing with a shotgun outside of a california McDonalds saying: “Where's dat silly wabbit.” He culled most of the material from daily newspapers. When he compiled enough pages he would run them off on the hospital copy machine, putting out a couple hundred copies of the magazine. One day a security guard found him photocopying the magazine and hauled him up to the head of the lab, who told him the magazine was obscene and eventually fired him. It amazed me that this guy could walk through rooms of cages filled with mice heavily laden with intentionally introduced cancer tumors, past tables of beheaded rats, slit open and splayed out past the stench of death and the refrigerators filled with vials containing every horrendous disease, past lead boxes of highly radioactive materials—even worse was the fact that this lab, according to Johnny, obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars in AIDS research grants with no intention of using the monies for that purpose—and yet he could pale before the photocopies of news murder stories that his co-workers poured over every lunchtime while eating their sandwiches. I remember asking Johnny at the time why he made the magazine. He talked about the thin line people contain, which they can instantaneously cross to become windmills of slaughter. He talked about the hypocrisy people embody when they can step over the dying alcoholic sprawled outside their front door on their way to the newsstand where they buy a paper and become horrified at a printed photograph of a starving ethiopian. He said: “It's the separation people feel from those who commit acts of violence or murder. The way they feel that a person who murders belongs to the
other
. But then a guy murders thirty people and seven million people line up to buy the book about those murders.

“Look at what we live in, the violence evident in the scores of people dying in the streets of starvation. It is the result of growing up in the techno age; people are unable to respond emotionally to reality unless it is translated through media images.”

JOURNAL EXCERPT:

Two centimeters beneath Johnny's curiosity about murder exists one of the sweetest heterosexual guys I've ever come into contact with. His intelligence and his fearless: “Yes” to everything reminds me of the intense friendships I had as a kid, when you think you'll know each other the rest of your life and there is no such thing as death or danger. The world we create in a day's adventure exists outside the rest of the world. Or else, it seems as if the outside world participates in the adventure we're creating with our own actions and gestures and ideas but somehow a transparent envelope of protection has opened up and we're traveling through it and doing what we want and the world is surrounding the envelope, frozen and witnessing us for fractions of time but unable to interfere or step through the invisible walls of the envelope except to give us pizza or drive the subway train we're on. I love feeling invisible to the world when I want to walk through it, or examine it.