Close to the Knives (26 page)

I've come down with a case of shingles and it is so scary, I don't even want to write about it. I don't want to always think about death or the virus or illness. I don't want to see in people's eyes that
witnessing
of my or others', silent decline. I don't want the burden of
acceptance
of the idea of death, departure, of becoming fly food, as my friend Kiki would say. I don't want to cease to exist. I don't want my mobility to cease to exist. One can't affect things in one's death, other than momentarily. One cannot change one's socks or tuck the sheets or covers around one's own body in death. One cannot be vocal or witness the lies of time. I don't want to witness the silencing of my own body. I don't want to be polite and crawl into the media grave of “AIDS” and disappear quietly. I don't want my death to have the pressured earmarks of
courage
or
strength
, which are usually catchphrases for the idea of politeness. I also cannot scream continuously without losing my voice. I wonder if it was the mid-'80s realization of the AIDS epidemic that woke me up and helped me draw back from the self-destruction that these other friends found themselves spinning into uncontrollably. I also marvel at how death can be so relentless and constant and how such enormous sections of the social landscape can be viciously exploded by a handful of rich white people, with an entire population's approval and participation. And I am amazed to discover that I have been building a suit of armor in response to the extensive amount of death overtaking members of my social landscape. That suit of armor consists of making more of an attempt to
continue
each time I hear of a new death. The grief hardens and is added to the armor. The armor takes the shape of wanting to see an accountability taken by those responsible. I know I'm not going to die merely because I got fucked in the ass without a condom or because I swallowed a stranger's semen. If I die it is because a handful of people in power, in organized religions and political institutions, believe that I am expendable. And with that knowledge I lie down among the folds of my sheets and dream of the day when I cross an interior line. That line is made of a quota of strength and a limit of pain. I know those institutions are simply made of stones and those people are simply made of blood and muscle and bone, and I know how easily they can go, how easily I can take them with me. My thoughts consist of wondering if the earth will spin a little faster when my thoughts become action.

PHONE CALL:

“David … you know that friend of mine in Kentucky? Well I got a call from a friend of mine who just got back from being down there. She said he was getting way out of it … I mean, like … he had lost about fifty to seventy-five percent of his body weight and they were having to transfuse him once a week. He was down; he couldn't walk at all. He was being carried around by his family, in a wheelchair and he had to go to the hospital every day, also, because of DHPG transfusions, because he was becoming blind from C.M.V. retinitis. So … uh … he would spend most of the mornings in the hospital and then the afternoons he would spend resting at this house that they had. Then he had a grand-mal seizure … and he was just like … you know—convulsing like crazy … I never seen one of those; I only heard … and uh … you know—he became all different colors … and … uh … was just gasping for breath and finally they were able to sedate him somehow so that the seizure ended … and … uh … this friend of mine who was very close to him went down to visit because his family had called and said, “It doesn't look that great.” And … uh … I think, after being there just one or two nights, he was deteriorating—his fever went up very high and he was really kind of delirious all the time. They were giving him a lot of morphine. They had sent him home from the hospital; they stopped all the treatments and everything like that because they felt that this was just like … “Why torture him any more?” And … uh … at one point—finally, these two people—a friend and a family member—after he had had a small seizure and was in a semicoma—they just decided to put a pillow over his face … you know … do that … and there was no resistance or anything that they could tell … and … uh … I think they made a very courageous decision …”

I found myself in the midst of a media spectacle concerning an essay I wrote for an exhibition at a publicly funded space downtown. The show concerned AIDS in a community of friends. The government agency that partially funded the show stepped in and yanked the funding because I called a notorious bigot in st. patrick's cathedral a “fat cannibal.” I regret that I didn't take the time to go public and apologize to the cardinal for calling him “fat”—thereby inadvertently insulting people with weight problems. Being that this cardinal is such a media ham and has secret martyr fantasies, it didn't take him long to pull his skirts up and reveal his psychotic intentions in the AIDS epidemic. Within a week, the vatican and the cardinal put forth their opinion that, “It is a much more terrible thing to use condoms than it is to contract AIDS.”

A number of letters arrived in my name at the exhibition space and a person who worked there put them in a large envelope and mailed them to my home address. The envelope was lost for a month and a half in the new york city postal system. I finally received the package about two months ago. There were a few letters from born-again christians wondering about the state of my soul. I never bothered to read them once I got to the first mention of “jesus”—besides the fact that there were no tape recorders in those days and the guy they call jesus was wildly misquoted—born-again christians are worse than reformed smokers.

One of the other letters was from a married lawyer in another state who had once been of essential help to me in getting off the streets as a teenager. He and I had had a relationship that started out as sexual, with money changing hands, and ended in a real communication that helped me take the steps to get off the conveyor belt of 42nd street that gave a one-way ride into the mouth of a giant grinning deathskull. I'd met guys this society would incarcerate or kill who gave me more than any government official, state agency, or christian outfit like the salvation army ever did or could.

The other letter was from Dakota.

TAPE RECORDING:

JOE
: Once you recognize the shape of something, the thrill of it is gone—well, the death appeal, I realized for me is: I recognize the mechanics of what I'm doing and then it loses its appeal and I look at the fact that this is gonna be my life forever, doing the same thing—and I ain't just talking about drugs. I'm talking about
everything
. This is what made me leave North Carolina and come to New York. It's looking down the line and realizing that this is the way it is until I die and most of the time the dissatisfaction with that outlook makes me essentially know what my life is gonna be like. Here is death down here at the end and you're up here looking down this line, then you say, just like in the tv commercial where they go like, “Take a Certs,” and then you go swoosh, and you say, “Let's just move
death
right up
here,”
and skip all this shit because it's gonna be the same thing over and over again … it makes death seem appealing. I just had that feeling the other day, it's like, “Oh.
Great!
This goes on
forever.”
Why don't I just move it up and get it over with. I'm sure that that's what was happening to Dakota, especially when you come off drugs; I've said this over and over again, I mean, you look at the sum total of your life and it's usually in a pretty big wreck behind you and it's almost impossible to see ahead of you to see the changes. Only when you can get some real distance on it can you see that the future can be just as exciting as the past was, because you have no idea what's gonna happen. So then it makes it more appealing to live.

D.
: That's what I'm trying to get at. The grainy kind of dark shit that's already there in the psychic landscape of america, in the structure of things we're trying to survive in—but then, when you add the drugs to it, it exacerbates it in a way so subtle that you don't even realize it and it's so consuming that there's no point in stopping the drugs. Plus, once addiction sets in even if you can magically get to a place where you could get perspective on it, you're already caught in its gears. I mean, in the midst of the fake moral screens of government and organized religion that chews up life rather than supporting life, all the structure we're told to assume in the midst of heavy control and manipulation—even the violent act that Dakota created—it's totally recognizable what that anger is: the desire to tear through what is outlined for you to follow, and you know it's not true to you. There's nothing about the government's actions or the actions of rich white people in power that can convince us that that outline is true. We're told not to cross certain lines, and yet those lines are crossed every day by those in power, in the guise of protecting interests or whatever. What I understand about the things you make and the things Dakota made is that if the government and institutions want to play this game called “freedom” and they want to speak at political rallies and say, “Yes. yes. yes. We have freedom in this society,” then people are going to push at these invisible boundaries to see if it's true. But what is the attraction to death images? Is the attraction based on the idea that death is coming anyway? So why not speed up the process because we're just exhausting ourselves waiting?

JOE
: Not so much that it's coming, it's just that in society we have such a high thrill index, due to the way everything is assimilated so fast with the media, especially with tv. We have a desire for a quick end, y'know people, I think this is a common thread in all people, not just us. Once you recognize the void, how do you fill it? Most people fill it with money, fill it with romance, with thrills—but most people are afraid to carry it out to it's logical end, to where they really want it to carry them, so as a result we have tv shows that show people getting caught by the cops and doing all these crimes because it's
real
people doing
real
crimes that
we
wish
we
could do. Or it's people loving to see someone get seriously murdered just because they don't do it themselves. It's no secret that people have a big fascination for the Manson cult or Patty Hearst or the S.L.A. or something like that, because they do what people wish
they
could, because all people feel these same things about society. Well, I think all people feel this inside, but a lot of them just bury these feelings under a lot of other stuff.

D.
: It's true. I feel that only the “insane” may not feel this impulse to shred these screens.

JOE
: Only the people who don't
accept
it—that's the dividing line. There are people who accept the way things are and the way things are gonna be and then there are those who don't. Dakota was one of the ones who didn't accept the way things are gonna be—so he did something about it. You and I see the same things he did but we have chosen to accept the way things are. That's a real challenge—to keep doing things in spite of the way things are. I still have these very violent fantasies. A good example: Joe Stark, or Donald Westlake, as he's known, wrote this whole series of books about this guy Parker. They came out during the Vietnam war and during the Nixon years and they were all methodical accounts of this guy Parker planning these bank jobs or these big heists and never getting caught, and he was totally emotionless. The national attitude was: we hate Nixon and what he's done, what he did was all wrong, and yet these books were totally popular because people still had these fantasies of doing these totally anonymous crimes against the system. I have a real problem with that
still
—when I went out to california I was looking for somebody who wanted to do
real
jobs, that was the thing and I could never figure it out. I just didn't give a fuck at that point, and that was right when I came off drugs. I still have these fantasies: I try and think of places I can just go in and rob. Who knows? Maybe I will someday, and if I do nobody'll ever fucking hear about it …

JOURNAL ENTRY:

I wrote Dakota and haven't heard back from him. I included my telephone number and asked him to call collect. Nada. I've been starting to obsess about seeing him. I know he carries something that I recognized when I first met him years ago and maybe with him being clean for the first time in years I can touch that with him. Maybe he can show me something in myself, some essential tool that will connect all these fragments I've seen. I feel like I am half stationary and half seated on a weird carnival ride, being flipped up and down and all around, but really it is nothing more than going through the paces of each day. Maybe it's the information coming through electronic instruments: this person died, that person's dying, so and so died, on tv. I'm still hearing “fag” jokes, president Bush holds a press conference to tell the world he hates broccoli, Jeane Kirkpatrick sits on television talking about the glorious state of the u.s.a., and all I can think of is gallons of human blood. Nixon is telling everyone it never happened, Ryan White has died and already the media has replaced him with a ten-year-old from portland who says, “It ain't a bad disease …” while Ted Koppel, the announcer, says, “Why do you think adults act so silly about it?”—
Silly
?—do you poke a microphone in the face of a ten-year-old and suggest that Hitler was being
silly
?

I wrote Dakota another postcard, telling him I wanted to try to go down to texas and hang out with him and maybe ride the back roads together. I'd heard about some legendary swimming holes where, among the moccasins and alligators, country boys play naked country boy games in the shore reeds. I tell him that Joe is clean and in N.A., that Johnny is on methadone and he and Laura have a kid—a sweet big-headed little guy with huge eyes filled with amazement or confusion. I don't know what I think anymore. I feel like some terribly important question is left hanging in the air. I ask Dakota why he isn't answering my letters.