THE NEW YORK NATIVE
APRIL 7, 1988
The first time we met at a legendary party at his 7 Tailor Lane loft, Krü Wetley told me his first name was short for “cruising.” He kissed my hand with the flourish of a Prussian duke, and his hazel eyes sparkled with mischief under a flop of Midwest corn-blond hair. It wasn’t until he was dying that I learned he told his other friends that it stood for “crucifix” or “crudité” or “Crucible, The” or “cruel, cruel world.” Asking someone the full expression of their name is not something you can politely do more than once, which left Krü free to reimagine himself in every relationship he had. He reveled in this freedom, the freedom of a slippery identity. This could, of course, make lovers and friends and gallery owners and roommates cranky. (“Where’s the Krü that pays rent?” was a common refrain.) The only fact of him that wasn’t constantly in flux was that he was a wildly inventive and exuberant artist. That, and a warm, loving friend.
The New York Times loves to pretend that scores of brilliant young gays are suddenly dying in droves by a million vague concerns. AIDS does not exist in the lexicon of Times obituaries, and Krü’s death is no exception. But Krü Wetley died of AIDS; he had not merely been “ill for some time” like some consumptive Victorian lady. He was a gay man with many lovers and friends, all of whom watched helplessly as his body was ravaged by this disease. There would probably be a part of Krü that would be tickled by the vagueness of his official obit, the way it lets the reader fill in the gaps. But there would be another part of him that would rage. For all his mischievous experimentation, Krü loathed when others tried to define him on their terms. He raged when AIDS succeeded.
It’s a cliched story but a true one: Krü escaped small-town Indiana the day he graduated high school. “My dad wanted me to have a comfortable, safe life,” he said in an interview with The Native just last year, “and he did everything he could to ignore the fact that I didn’t want it.” He arrived in the East Village in June 1981 with the money he earned working construction. A self-taught sculptor who used whatever materials were free and accessible, he was quickly scooped up by East Village galleries like Cash/Newhouse and Civilian Warfare.
Krü was not slick or hip or punk. He had a hyuck-hyuck laugh and thought Don Rickles was the pinnacle of humor. He smoked Marlboros and drank Bud Light, hooking his finger through the plastic loops of his six-pack and carrying it around the stylish parties at his apartment building in the Financial District. “I’m not paying those ManHATin prices,” he’d say when people made fun of his hick tastes.
But what other artist would cruise the Ramble with a canvas tote and garden spade, pants still around his ankles, and scoop up the dirt and clay beneath his knees and turn it into a shockingly realistic bust of Ronald Reagan, which he then glazed with his own semen?
Another work involved a massive artificial sand dune in Central Park, laced with burning embers. Krü collected his own tears and then, using an eye dropper, dripped them one by one onto the smoldering sand. Influenced by the classic beatnik novel “Water Water” by Ari Epstein, which follows its unconventional protagonist, a single drop of water, through time to the end of the world, Krü saw himself as continuing Epstein’s conversation. “Tears don’t disappear; they just dry up. I might die, but you can’t get rid of me.”
Krü was in the middle of his next opus when he got sick, and he finished it out of sheer determination and will. This final work resurrected the legacy of Scarlett Schwartz, who some are now calling the mother of indecent New York (high praise), by molding a likeness of the 61-year-old woman out of melted dildos and draping her body in stunningly painted snakes, hand-stitched using the dollar bills he earned turning tricks.
Any moments you spent with Krü would be filled with surprises, adventure, irritation, anxiety and sometimes joy. Would it be stealing stop signs for him to hammer and weld into J. Edgar Hoover’s cock? Or a stroll through Central Park for wild berries to make into a pie? Krü was a roulette wheel we were all willing to spin. As he would constantly repeat in his aggravating Hoosier twang, “What’s the point of livin’ scared? That ain’t livin’, pal.”
After the stock market crash last year, the East Village art world began to lose our patrons, and with the ever-constricting python of AIDS, we’re losing our artists. As we mourn each death, we desperately hope Krü was right, that our work will outlive us. An entire brilliant, creative, daring generation is going dark, leaving a hole in time that may never be filled again.
Krü Wetley and his incredible imagination were taken from the world too soon. A memorial will take place in the form of an all-night dance party in his loft at 7 Tailor Lane on April 10, where we will be entertained by Krü’s muse—the infamous Scarlett Schwartz and her famous snake striptease—from 11 p.m. until the yuppie neighbors call the cops. We think Krü would have approved.