Close to the Knives (23 page)

My arm was turning green and black. All I can remember from my flirting with heroin is the problem I had keeping myself from throwing up each time I did it. Normally after a week or two of doing it on a daily basis I'd imagined that I wouldn't be wasting what little money I had on bending over the curb between parked cars and trying to discreetly empty out my guts onto the asphalt, which appeared in some sort of magnified state with each fragment of garbage and wrapper and dog shit and scraping and bottle cap. Somebody had given me a number of fresh hypodermics and for a while they made me happy and focused on something outside the black cloud of depression that seemed to swallow the streets outside my door every time I left the house to go do the meaningless work routine or buy food. I lived in a shitty one-room apartment in the back of a building on east fourth street. My back window had a view of the shower room of the firehouse on 3rd street, where occasionally I would watch some sexy fireman step out of a shower stall and dry his body off and put on each article of civilian clothing he kept in a neatly folded pile on a ledge behind the window. There were a couple of weed trees that were about four stories tall that waved between the brick walls of my building and the firehouse. I literally felt I was at the end of my life; existence seemed like a bad series of routines that led to nothing I cared about. Ever since I was a kid I couldn't shake the realization that life was essentially a series of activities designed so that one could pay out money to keep from dying; if one stopped paying, one died; whether from exposure, starvation, lack of medical care or invisibility.

I fixed myself a shot and went out for a walk and got about seven blocks when I started puking. I had to stop about five times on each block to spew out water between parked autos. My eyes were tearing up and the city streets expanded and contracted 'til they became tunnel-like and brilliant with sunlight bouncing off the edges. I went home and laid down on the mattress. It was like a cave, all dark and cool, while outside the brick wall was glowing with sunlight and the whispering shadows of a breeze-tossed tree. I saw a series of transparent images appear in the air halfway between my face and the windows, almost like a slide projector carousel clicking away. First a series of physics equations and then a donald duck no more than five inches tall looking at me with his quacky smile. I leaned over the side of the bed and threw up into the wastepaper can I'd placed there. Then I felt warm, like my bones were resting in a bathtub full of almost hot water. Then I went unconscious.

Later, in a restaurant with Peter Hujar, having a cup of coffee, I showed him my arm. It felt foreign to me, like an arm out of a monster movie that belonged to somebody else. I felt like a long distance scientist showing another scientist a weird animal relic. I was almost completely disassociated from myself. Peter looked at me with an odd look in his eyes and said, “Don't ever come over my house again. I won't be friends with you if you're going to do that.” I burst into tears. “I just feel so terrible about living,” I said. “I feel too self-conscious about living and it's driving me crazy.” He reached over and rubbed my arm. I went home later and never did it again. It took a number of months for the grainy black pall to lift from the surfaces and activities around me. It never lifted completely, but I realized that would never happen unless the entire society stopped dead in its tracks and the direction it was speeding in got erased.

Sometime in the mid-80s, I was working on a filmscript, with Johnny, called
Teenage Satan
. We based it on a true story of a group of kids out in Long Island that followed an older kid through a series of motions that embraced black magic and mescaline and any other drug they could lay their hands on. The leader of the group ended up killing one of the other guys in an acid laden hallucination of communication with lucifer. None of the thirty or more kids who learned about the murder said anything to their folks or the authorities. Some kids even went back to the local park where the body was lying under a pile of dead leaves to look at the states of decomposition. The leader of the group said if he got picked up by the cops he'd kill himself and chase the dead kid's soul to hell. Some girl eventually heard about the murder at a pool party and called the police. The leader got arrested and killed himself in jail. We were using the script to talk about relationships of power: how the leader was given power by the other kids and even though he was kind of stupid, the other kids' adulation and respect kept him propped up there in control. It's kind of like Ronald Reagan.

We planned to shoot scenes involving the constant hallucinations of the leader and use those hallucinations to outline a series of power structures in american society. We understood the kids' use of drugs and their kind of ignorant understanding of the basics of black magic to be nothing more than the only available tools with which to rearrange the imposed hell of the suburbs for brief periods of time. We wrote the part of lucifer for Dakota. The leader of the gang was constantly hallucinating conversations with lucifer. An independent tv group had filmed the leader in an interview that was later played on television. We figured that even if the leader was delusional, the power of media helped validate his sense of power among the peer group and helped add a bit of rocket fuel to the murder that ultimately came about. We planned to film the suicide from the leader's perspective—after he dies from hanging himself in the jail cell, he tries to get into heaven. Shooting from his point of view, heaven was an ultra-fancy restaurant with a maitre d' that refuses him entrance. Jesus was played by a myopic overweight guy with frankenstein stitches evident around his neck and temples, bad teeth, and a penchant for gluttony. He sloshes wine around and chomps into a roast chicken, throwing half-eaten legs into the air where the camera would follow their slow-motion descent through the floor into hell, and starving wretches would scramble for it. Muzak played in the background and a soundtrack of a man's voice periodically announced, “ATTENTION SHOPPERS … THERE IS A SPECIAL SALE ON HOLY WATER IN AISLE THREE.…” Tapes of Jimmy Swaggert were recorded backwards and mixed in the soundtrack to reflect the practice of the church to plant subliminal messages in our environment.

During the making of this film, Johnny was getting yanked around by his addiction. There is nothing worse to me than witnessing a friend's addiction to dope accelerate. It leaves me with the feeling of standing in the distance watching a person I like and respect slowly twitch around and disintegrate into fragments, quietly becoming a shell of his former self. It feels like something related to body-snatchers films on late-night tv, and nothing you say, no gesture you make, stops the unravelling of it. I remember at the time that his addiction brought a quality of energy to the filming. Even though I'd get pissed off and depressed with all the kinetic fragmentary whirls of darkness, it seeped into the scenes and the constant odd occurrences that seemed more than chance. Things would happen that gave us an impression that our environment was fucking with our minds and adding spice to the proceedings once the cameras were rolling.

I don't remember what happened to Dakota. There were times leading up to the beginning of filming when he disappeared for long periods. I remember people wondering if he had committed suicide. I heard that he had a crush on Joe. Then he'd surface again. I heard he was addicted to dope. I heard he stabbed somebody and it wasn't sure if the guy died or not. I felt a disjointed kind of sadness for him; everything was too erratic in my daily life and if I thought long enough about it I could only think that there wasn't anything I could do. I didn't know him well enough and I didn't think it would have mattered—he was blasting towards something in another neighborhood and though he was familiar to me in terms of something he carried, some similar code and energy, I felt like my own life was twisting and rushing just out of my grasp. I was waiting for something to drop like a mile-long boulder on top of me or on top of my life. I wanted a radical shift to occur so I could have a few minutes' peace or experience the silencing of my brain. I wanted to be another person living a quiet farm life in a foreign culture. I wanted to wake up and find that I was five years old and my parents and neighbors would say, “My, my, what an imagination.” I wanted to be physically erased and start over again. I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to be there. I guess I wanted to be nowhere, I wanted to listen to my brain talk inside of nothingness. I wanted to be untouchable and have no
need
. I figured if Dakota stabbed and killed somebody, it was for a reason that only made sense to him. The stranger he stabbed was one-dimensional in my mind. I knew Dakota wasn't dangerous; he was simply skidding through the grainy black pall that surrounds addiction and life in america.

TAPE RECORDING:

DAVID
: What was the first time Dakota tried to kill himself?

JOE
: It must have around '84 or '85. See, I hung out with Dakota just about every day for a long time. He was like my best friend. I had various girlfriends around this time and I could never understand why he hated them so much. Then I found out he was attracted to me. This was around '84 and I was moving into a different circle. Things were changing around me. It was because I was tall and attractive and Dakota was short and ugly—let's be blunt here—people were more willing to talk to me than they were to him. I think his suicide had a lot to do with him seeing his circle—Johnny was also very attractive; we seemed to have no trouble getting laid and Dakota did; he'd always be telling me about these weird encounters and shit. He'd always be meeting these weird guys who were all kinked out and he'd have sex with them. Anyways it seemed we were going places that seemed closed to him, and when I look back I was always asking all these people to be in films and I'd only ask him to help with them. Now why was this? I don't know—we were moving around in all these circles and he resented the fuck out of it. He tried to kill himself. He wrote me this letter saying, “By the time you get this I will be dead. Come up to my apartment and you can have my synthesizer. I'll leave the door unlocked and I want you to take pictures of me dead.” I got this letter on a monday morning. He'd shot ten bags of heroin. So, I called up his job and there he was at his job and I said, “Hey … this is
real funny.”
Stuff like that just tended to alienate me even more. It got to a point where I just wished he'd go and do it—he tried it again. I think he was reacting to seeing his support group just peel away. He did tell me a
lot
that he just couldn't find anyone to be in a relationship with; just could not find anyone. When he went to texas he wrote me and told me he did find someone—he found a girl
and
a guy. See, I'd black all this shit out cause I wasn't interested in it. I remember him telling me once that he met some guy who he had sex with in doorways—he'd just bump into him; no names exchanged or nothing like that. Dakota also told me, as have some other gay people, his curse was that the guys he was attracted to were straight … which … I mean … why not give yourself two headaches …

D.
: … When you got that note did he really try and kill himself?

JOE
: Yeah. He shot ten bags of dope but it didn't work—he just woke up two days later.

D.
: Did he explain that he was infatuated with you?

JOE
: Yeah. Of course. But I blocked it out—didn't think about it; didn't want to think about it because then it would make me question my own self; my own closetedness … these are things we macho dudes want to keep down … you know? I have the same taste for the bizarre that anyone else does but I fight to keep it in check … y'know? 'Cause I got enough cans of worms … hahaha. You know I went through my bisexual period—that's probably what freaked Dakota out; because I went out with some other dude. Me and this guy would start sharing these girlfriends; we'd start having these threesomes—I knew why I was doing it … because I was having doubts about what I was into. But that might've sent him over the edge. I also noticed that—see, we were drifting apart and this happened to me before; this just happened to me recently—this girl I was with, I told her, “I can't see you any more”; we'd already had this agreement that we wouldn't get serious, anyway, “I can't see you any more.” So, “Oh, I'm pregnant.” It's like, “Oh, I'm gonna kill myself.”

I was entering a state of mind where I saw the outline of my life as far as the direction it was moving. I could see the outline, the content, and the back wall of it. I knew I didn't want to touch the back wall because there was no coming back for me. I kept having the recurring sensation of standing a block away, watching this familiar but transparent version of myself pacing around in small circles next to a line of self-destruction. Every so often the figure would stop, turn to face the line and lift one foot in the air as if to step over. The foot remained in that position while I got in a car and left for a trip around the states. I met up with Johnny, Joe, and Sammy some months later in Nashville and we headed southeast through tobacco fields and southern floods, hits of acid and shopping-mall movies. One night, in some dying coastal town with a pitiful amusement park, we did some acid and walked the beach until we found a building containing a pool that glowed from underwater lights. Jumping off the diving board seated in easy chairs, we threw all the pool furniture into the water. We had a box of fireworks in the form of large gunpowder-filled Space Rockets. Down on the dark, wet sands of the beach we opened the box. We snapped the wings and air blades that determined flight direction off the sides of each rocket before lighting the fuses. What resulted at the moment of launch sometimes had us throwing ourselves to the ground covering our heads or else running towards the midnight waves with a flaming projectile close at our heels.