David thought he might live in Paris for the rest of his life. So, during a last itchy week in New York, he attended to things he’d been putting off. He took his driver’s test—and passed. He finally came out to his old buddy John Hall—who did not reject him, as David had feared. And he called Dolores, who said she’d contacted a medium on his behalf. David would find success, get his hot temper under control, and be healthy all of his later life.
David was so filled with tension, that something seemed to have cracked open in him. When he said his last goodbye to Phillip Seymour, he hallucinated—he saw a wolf’s head and felt his own jaws elongating. A few days before that, he’d written in the journal, “feeling animalistic. Feeling hyena. Feeling wolf. Feeling dog. I am tongue and heart. Stillness in the morning. I reject all other thoughts of love and friendship.” And in that same piece came the line, “My heritage is a calculated fuck”—the first sentence of a book he would write more than ten years later, Close to the Knives.
His life was about to change, and everywhere he looked were signs and portents. Everything was magnified now. Everything signified.
Two days before leaving town, David witnessed the legendary Marsha P. Johnson “flipping out” on Christopher Street. The Stonewall veteran and cofounder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries was walking toward the river, rifling through garbage cans, stuffing bits of trash into a white gift box, “saying in mock suburban housewife: my my what a pretty gift,” David wrote in his journal. One minute, she was jumping—shoeless but in white athletic socks—and the next, lying in the street, where people who knew her tried to help her up, “the green glitter making her eyes more manic.” She wanted money: “I ain’t eaten in three fuckin’ days.” And David handed her some. He couldn’t articulate just why this scene so disturbed him, beyond feeling “a sense of imprisonment.” But this was his old street life, his hopelessness, turned into spectacle.
On September 5, 1978—the night before he left for Paris—he had dinner with John Hall and then stopped by Dirk Rowntree’s apartment in the West Village to give him a poster. He suggested that Dirk might document this momentous occasion, do a portrait of the artist walking toward Europe. Out on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Tenth Street, Dirk photographed David’s legs stepping from the curb, then David’s head almost haloed in a blur of passing headlights, mouth open, eyes full of eagerness—and trepidation.
David took to Europe everything he owned. Two big bags. Heavier perhaps were the plans and goals with which he’d weighted himself: He would write a novel. He would find a publisher for the monologues. He would create illuminations for Rimbaud’s Illuminations. He would illustrate Dennis DeForge’s new poetry manuscript—and the children’s book Phillip Seymour planned to write. He would make money from his drawings and writings, then send for Brian. He would work daily on the journal and correspond with friends. He would take Brian’s old guitar, learn to play it, then write songs. And, of course, he would master the language. Finally. He had failed second-year French for three consecutive school terms.
In fact, his nine months in Paris would change him profoundly, though he accomplished few of the goals he’d set for himself. Instead, he fell in love for the first time, found his voice as a writer, and discovered that he was rather hopelessly American.
The plan was to meet Pat on September 8 in Normandy, where her boyfriend, Jean-Pierre Pillu, had a house. David flew to London. There he caught the train to Southampton and began recording the foreign. The grass out there! English grass! While waiting for the Channel ferry the next day, he pictured French docks right out of Genet: “a hooded area of fog and broken sliding piers populated with cutthroat sailors.” I don’t think this was willful naiveté so much as—hope.
After six days in Normandy, he and Pat and Pillu arrived in Paris on David’s twenty-fourth birthday, September 14. His first impressions shocked him. So bourgeois. Where was the city of Rimbaud? Or, as he put it to Pillu, “Where’s the underworld?” Pillu promised that some night soon he’d drive David through the Bois de Boulogne to show him “the travesties”—transvestites. Which was not, of course, what David had in mind.
Then, just blocks from their apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement, he discovered the Pigalle: “very much like Times Square with leather suited pale ghostwhite anemic boys—some muscled brutes with lowset eyes,” transvestites, and “sailor types straight from the pages of Genet … prostitutes.… bag ladies … young Cocteauian boys struggling through the gas and heat of passing cars.” Now he felt more at home. Even better was his discovery the next night of the Left Bank. Here Brassaï and all the writers he loved had sipped coffees in cafes, and he was walking where they had walked. He slept on cushions on his sister’s floor. Out the window, he noted the “starlit world over Cezanne rooftops.” Pat and Pillu bought him an Underwood typewriter at a flea market for his birthday. Now he could write poems and start the novel and do some letter writing, though he wondered how he was going to afford the postage.
During his first full day in Paris, he visited the Louvre, and the first painting to really catch his eye was Le sommeil d’Endymion by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson: a naked young man swoons in a forest glade, while a grinning cherub hovers in the air. David glued a postcard of it into his journal. For him, the painting was all about sex. “Sexual tension is in my loins at this point,” he wrote. “The departure from the sexual life of NYC now up in my smooth throat—like a gasp—the body of the fallen male—intoxication.… I could put my mouth to his and taste wine.” The next day, back at the Louvre, he found Un coin de table, Henri Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and their circle. After leaving the museum to walk along the Seine, he unexpectedly had a sexual encounter—outdoors—with a man who parted from him by drawing, as David put it, “an ‘X’ in invisible red lines over my heart.… I tasted blood on my lips and walked delirious through the side streets of the Louvre.” It would take him another ten days to figure out that the big gay cruising ground in Paris after dark—and maybe even during the day—was the Tuileries, the large formal garden just west of the museum.
Within his first week at his sister’s apartment, he’d outlined a “a semisurreal erotic novel,” Auto Noir. He intended to base this on his own journey from New York to Paris. Sort of. Apparently it would be about sense impressions, and probably more “surreal” than “semi.” In a letter to Michael Morais written on October 1, 1978, he explained the term “auto noir” as “automatic entry into the subconscious in foreign spaces … the black auto that waits around every corner; black auto of fear or groundlessness … black auto containing within its trunk all the unspoken desires and actions; black auto of chance.” There would also be photos in this book: a snake, a whirl of “light lengths,” desolate passageways beneath bridges, moon-or lamp-illuminated statues in public gardens, and “daytime photos of symbols that reflect areas of thinking.”
David kept trying to access his subconscious through lofty imagery and a kind of automatic writing, hoping no doubt that something “real” would shake out. He was terribly afraid of his actual subject matter, and finally admitted as much in a letter to his old girlfriend Jezebel Cook. He told her he’d started to overcome this fear—because he was outlining the “street novel” based on his life. He’d started it three times in New York and given up each time.
By the beginning of October, he was a regular at the Tuileries. On October 9, for example, he squatted outside the Louvre in the afternoon listening to a street musician, went home for a nap, and returned after dark, noting the bums and bag ladies at the Metro station “laid out like mortuary bundles on the slatted benches.” He squeezed between the locked gates at the Tuileries and immediately encountered a blond guy in a black leather jumpsuit, who approached David and grabbed his crotch. “I felt as if I could only surrender to it.… I have never felt any need or desire for exhibitionism … but there was a great sense of pleasure in doing this all within eyeball of any number of buildings and national monuments.” They were close enough to the fountain to hear fish splashing.
He’d noticed the characters hanging out at Place Saint-Michel by the fountain. “Just low down beaten people with a wild look of criminality in their eyes.” He wished he could speak to them. His French-deprived muteness was already starting to get him down. “I’m doing so much writing so’s to keep a hold of my sanity and language,” he wrote several days later in letters to Brian Butterick and John Hall, “… never thought so deeply as this.”
He began a new project called “Study of the Internal Anatomy of the Face,” a visual record of places where something had occurred to effect his life, his consciousness—events now over but “forever fixed in the non-seeing eye.” With his sister’s camera, he roamed the city photographing, for example, candles at Notre Dame—because he’d lit a candle there for his father weeks earlier. If and when he returned to New York, he would, of course, add Times Square.
He went to a Wim Wenders film, in German with French subtitles, so he could measure “the effect of seeing a film that [he] could only respond to either on a visual level or else on the level of voice intonations.” He concluded that the sensations he had were the same ones he’d experienced “in cross country buses, in the silent dozing seats of a stranger’s automobile … following the spinal cord of highway in a way that transcends the timeclock of the heart … so that one is a viable coasting vehicle of thought and response not held in by boundaries created in the fusion of society and physical law.”
He wrote a set of letters to his mother, advising her to keep a journal, commiserating over the death of her cat: “For the cat its all completed and for you its an experience to assimilate and then continue with your life, with the realization of the great things that came from that contact.… Since we can’t totally conceive of death as far as all the elements involved, then we owe it to ourselves and the creatures involved (whether it be people animals or senses) to learn as much as we can from it.” In another missive, he commented on her observation that there was “a veil” between them. It was because he couldn’t tell her everything, he said. He was interested in characters and lifestyles that “seem to go against the established order,” and it might cause her pain.
David enjoyed just hanging out in a sexual milieu like the Tuileries—so forbidden and potentially dangerous. This was the heart of the tourist district, after all, and on many nights, the police raided, sending men scurrying over the fences. One night when David arrived, a man he identified as “an arab” managed to convey the question, “Any cops?” No. The man put his hand on David’s crotch, then dropped his pants and bent over with his arms around a tree so David could fuck him. Afterward David went to the fountain and washed, watching other men in the shadows as he pulled some bread and ham from a sack and made sandwiches for himself. Leaning his head against the stone side of the fountain, he stared “up at the spiralling sky” and thought about the distances he’d come in his life.
One panel from a two-page cartoon strip David drew in the style of Bill “Zippy the Pinhead” Griffith for his friend Susan Gauthier. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
He wrote daily now unless he was traveling, and sometimes even then. During his first six weeks in France, he spent almost half his time in Normandy, where he stayed in an old house across from Pillu’s place. He wrote, drew pictures of the chickens in the yard, created a cartoon for his friend Susan Gauthier, and raced over the country roads on Pillu’s motorbike. On about half those Normandy days, Pat and Pillu were with him. He was completely dependent on them now, and their apartment at 6 rue Laferrière was just a studio. He let them know that he had friends in Paris he could stay with, so he didn’t always have to intrude. But who would that have been? In fact, he had no one even to talk to except Pat and Pillu. In the journal, he wrote, “[I would] sleep out under the seine bridges and in the gardens and elsewhere … staying up all night if I have to among the street characters along St. Michel in my grubby coat with my notebooks and scribbling.… The experiences are needed … necessary.”
He dreamt that his face was no longer his own. “Realizing that my life has been composed of series of strange and seemingly wounding incidents; time, places and situations that one would suppose would leave deep scars of the invisible forehead.… What I am realizing is that all those periods of my life, all the experiences no matter how some of them smell of shit and others are wrapt in stinking rags. What surfaces in the image mind is that of a brilliant white heart metamorphoses.”
Before leaving New York, he’d sent the monologues to City Lights, where he wanted so badly to be published that he even dreamt about it. They wrote him in Paris to say that they weren’t looking at new manuscripts now. He decided to try for a European publisher. After a month in France, nothing was coming together for him. He was in free fall, “a viable coasting vehicle,” and he couldn’t really see what he was doing.
Just observing. Just writing. Just thinking. France would prove to be his education, and this was the homework.
But he had made no effort to learn French, or to get a job. By the end of October, he was talking in the journal about a return to the United States and his plans for “extended hoboing.” He wrote, “I need constant intense experience so that I feel I’m living and alive … as opposed to dreary existence of stabilization. But for whom?.… Who am I illuminating with my writings—myself and a handful of known people or what?”
That night he dreamt that the sun and moon had merged. Then two suns appeared, spinning like pinwheels, much like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. He knew he was dreaming and would want to write it down later. So he observed carefully, trying to memorize the shapes. There were two skies now, and strange objects zooming through them. “They represented some important knowledge or symbol I couldn’t understand.”
“Met a fella towards dark dark evening.” It was November 1, 1978. David had spent the day reading a book on surrealism that he’d found in a West Village garbage can and brought with him. He made a sandwich to eat on a bench on rue Guillaume-Apollinaire. He took a Nico poster from a Saint-Michel wall, thinking he’d write a letter on it to Brian. He thought about Auto Noir, imagining himself at an artsy dinner party where someone would ask, “and what do you write?” and he’d reply, “It’s the same as asking me what I see; both before my eyes and behind them.” He headed for the Tuileries.
There he met Jean Pierre Delage, “a stranger leanin against the midnight doors of the Louvre,” as David, ever the romantic, wrote a couple of days later on the Nico poster. Actually, JP told me, they’d met “in a bush.” David went home with him. He wrote: “It’s hard to relate the changes I went through as a result of meeting a fella so fucking genuine and sincere and full of warmth—to lie down in a bed; on a mattress nude with another man whom you feel is both sexy and sensitive is a relief that wipes the brow clean of all insecurities and frustrations.” They put the mattress on the floor so it wouldn’t squeak as much and stayed in bed for about four hours. “First time in two months aside from Brian’s great letters that I’ve laughed and felt good in such a way,” David wrote later. “It was marvelous. Felt the old energy stirring within my veins finally.”
JP had a rough Gallic handsomeness. He was eight years older than David and worked as a hairdresser. He showed David a book he was reading about Sufism. He didn’t practice, he explained—just had an interest in Eastern philosophy. When they discussed some French traveler who’d gone to South America, David recommended he get Burroughs’s Yage Letters. Jean Pierre apologized for speaking poor English; he was self-taught. David wrote: “I took his beautiful face in my hands and said, look man; I should be the one apologizing.… Communication was in the eyes and fingertips; the senses we traded back and forth in small gestures would make statues blush. I felt so good and comfortable in his arms, in contact with his body and mind, that I coulda wept at the release it provided; it was a sudden and great unleashing of sexual tensions and held-in desires.”
JP took David’s face in his hands and said that it would be difficult to say goodnight to him. David felt the same, but declined JP’s invitation to spend the night. He’d promised Pat that he’d come home. “Plus” he wrote, “there’s a sense I get when I’m having such an intense and good time—I need to get away so I can assimilate the feelings/emotions that run so wildly in those periods of release; release of tensions sexual and otherwise.” He was writing all this back at Pat’s apartment, at three A.M. “I can’t find the words for what took place tonight and what is still taking place down in that bird within the chest.” JP had driven him home.
David underlined the following in red: “I slumped into the corner of the elevator and stared at my face in the big mirror on the opposite wall illuminated by fluorescent light. God I could hardly recognize myself.… I could hardly see with all that racing movement behind the eyes.”
Jean Pierre Delage. (Courtesy of Jean Pierre Delage)
He continued, “At one point late in the evening as we sat cross-legged smoking, talking, and stroking each other, he picked up the dictionary and looked up a word; looked at me and said: ah yeah … ‘caress’ … and smiled happily.”
That was written on a Thursday, in the wee hours. He didn’t see JP again till Saturday after work.
In between, he came up with three arty (and never realized) film ideas, advised himself on the direction of Auto Noir (never completed), dreamt that he was traveling the world to photograph “optic designs” and drew those he could remember, dreamt that he restored two dried-up snakes to life by putting them in water, watched The Hound of the Baskervilles dubbed into French, trolled the Latin Quarter (but noted, “I don’t find myself searching … now that I met this fella”), copied quotes from Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Jack Kerouac, and Giorgio de Chirico into his journal, drew someone leaning on a table, face not visible, with a bottle and some spillage, above the caption: “lost words of the loveless surviving the night.” And wrote a sort of prose poem, which became increasingly incoherent but began: “For Jean Pierre Delage: I’m resting on the surface of the Seine; a giant whose legs fit end external beneath the curved stanchions of the bridges; an anchoring down of this sometimes terrifying weight; my hands and arms made of sky.”
He couldn’t calm down.
He wrote to Janine Pommy Vega and Alex Rodriquez to say that he’d started talking to himself so he didn’t lose his English and that he could hear the music in the trees and the earth now: “little creatures wonkin among the grassblades, but contact and sensation has always been the jumpin point of departure for me; that swift journeylike sensation of being a viable living vehicle among the elements of the earth’s turning.” And now he had this new love. He’d have to clear old baggage, which was hard work—“like deciding to move the tree ten or fifteen years after we planted it.”
On Saturday night, he waited nervously for JP at Saint-Georges Metro station, thinking maybe he’d screwed up the time, maybe this wasn’t going to work. But JP was just late. David’s account of their dinner, their talk, their lovemaking is one long breathless sentence. JP showed David that he’d bought a French translation of The Yage Letters, and he’d nearly finished it. This time David spent the night, but neither of them slept well on the tiny bed. In the morning, Jean Pierre heated coffee on a camp stove and took a tiny package of butter and half a loaf of bread from the window ledge overlooking the courtyard six flights down. David wrote, “It tasted like food from the banquets of Monarchs but EVEN BETTER!”
They drove to Normandy. David was to spend the next two weeks there, but JP had to leave after two days. They had wine and wonderful meals (cooked by JP) and walks on the beach and “delicious sexual contact.” David even thought his French was improving; he could speak a full sentence now, with maybe an English word here or there. David began trying to recapture it all in words as soon as JP was gone. He remembered feeling near the end of the three-hour drive from Paris as if JP’s mind and body had suddenly merged with his own. “I’m breathing a sense of him in such a way that we are just about indistinguishable,” he wrote. “This is all in silence in the car with landscape drifting and what I suddenly feel is that he is mine and in some sense possessed within my coursing blood in my pores, not a selfish owning sense but just a total merge within and at that exact moment in comes arrowlike a realization that he is an entirely separate person and living independent of me and my blood and that it’s a subtle unknown thing that has drawn us together that is by no means certain or everlasting and from that I feel a striking and sudden faintness, a fever in my throat and forehead and my hands tremble invisibly and I’m about to black out in this fever and wanna grab onto something for all the frightening bareness I feel.”
He would revisit these feelings in a piece he made for his last show, in 1990 in a world devastated by AIDS. David took a photo of skeletons exposed in a Native American burial ground, then silk-screened over it words inspired by his yearning for connection and his fear of impending and constant loss: “When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending.… If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open your body and slip up inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fuse with yours I would.”
During one of their talks that weekend in Normandy, David felt he had explained himself “fully and justly” to Jean Pierre. His life. His work. So now, David concluded, “wherever this goes, it will at least go open-hearted.” As JP left and said he felt funny about going, David decided to stop pretending that it wasn’t affecting him. “You know … I feel,” he began, but realized he couldn’t articulate it. So he stopped and JP said, “Yes? What do you feel?”
David said, “Ah, never mind. It’s nothing.”
That night when he got into bed alone, he began talking to calm himself down: “My hands my arms my thoughts and all I can do is write yes that’s all I could do.”
David typed a letter to Brian on the Nico poster, covering both sides. It was all about meeting JP, his feelings for JP, including much of what he’d written in his journal. “I’ve changed since New York,” he announced. He was now “less afraid of emotional commitment.” And he had no intention of returning to America. “All it contains when I visualize the place is you … nothing else but fading photographs.” He hoped Brian would make it to Paris and maybe the two of them could go on to India together. “I still think much of you and still love ya.” He also wrote that he’d typed till three A.M. and thought he might tear the poster up now, “because of its personal sense.”
Again, he was afraid that he had said too much. But he didn’t tear it up. He just never mailed it.
Jean Pierre returned to Normandy the next weekend. The weekend after that, David took the train back to Paris. JP was feeling ill with a bad cold and got into bed, while David sat cross-legged on the edge talking about how angry and hurt he felt that he had to stay out in the country for such long periods of time. He also felt unable “to fully protest the situation as I am ‘guest’ and ‘being supported.’ “
Three days later he had a huge screaming argument with his sister. She thought he should go back to New York after Christmas. David was furious. She’d encouraged him to come, with the idea that he could stay for a long time. So he’d broken up his life in New York, sold his books, torn away from his friends—and developed a relationship with Jean Pierre. “She and her boyfriend encouraged me to explore life here, open up to it here—so I’ve done so and am faced with all this shit in the end.” David didn’t record her side of it, except to say that she called him selfish and told him to grow up. He told her he had grown up—to the point where he didn’t fear emotional commitment to JP.
“She doesn’t understand the depth of my emotions at this point—she said ask Jean Pierre to move to America—I could’ve slapped her at that point—she threatened to slap me.” She told him that now he’d seen what existed in Europe; he could save up and return. He told her he’d live on the fucking street before he’d return to New York.
Finally he walked out, toward the Seine. “I wanted to kill myself so fucking bad—nothing mattered anymore—but the idea that she would suffer for it made me not do it; the idea that I would never put these lips to JP’s again made me cease the action—I don’t want to die and yet I can’t face New York after all this. I CAN’T!!!”
He went back to Pat’s apartment and took a bath. She came in, but left again before he was out of the bathroom. He wrote her an eight-page letter to convey his confusion. By five P.M. he was walking the streets, waiting to call JP at six. He’d have to move in with him. That was his only hope. “The descending night,” he wrote in the journal he always had with him. “Auto noir—it is for sure delineated; the sense of the man spiraling on the tracks of oblivion.”
Just as he wrote those lines, standing by the Saint-George Metro, Pat stopped in front of him talking to some male model she knew. Pat and David then walked home together, talking more quietly. Later he would admit in a letter to a friend that both Pat and Pillu were having trouble finding work; “the responsibility of my being here is a little more than they expected,” he wrote. He loved Pat. He felt awful that they’d fought.
The next day, November 22, he went to the Alliance Française to inquire about enrollment in a French class and the requirements to get working papers. On November 23, he walked around Paris, realizing he didn’t have the faintest idea how to find work. He thought about his many plans: the illustrations for Rimbaud’s Illuminations, the “sensory journal surreal illustrations of day and night,” the Auto Noir project, the photos he still wanted to take in Paris, the novel, a book of surreal dream sketches, the song lyrics he’d begun to write. And he thought about Jean Pierre, the completeness he felt when lying against him. “I get hit with sudden fearful concern for all I know and all those I love … the vulnerability of things … the death that hatches … unravels like a seed in all of us.”
“Who the fuck am I and what am I racing towards?”
Within a week, David had moved in with Jean Pierre at 78 avenue de la Bourdonnais, near the Eiffel Tower. This was probably the wealthiest district in Paris, but JP had a maid’s room on the top floor, with a toilet down the hall and a shower in the basement—even a separate elevator. Someone had given him the place for free; he was saving to buy an apartment. He worked nearby at a salon called New Wave, and that’s the style he specialized in. “Hair in flame and in fire with red, pink, any kind of color and very strange shapes,” he said. “My job was like a show.” Passing window shoppers would stand outside and watch him work. “David saw that. He was laughing.”
At the Alliance Française, David took an admissions test, then watched as the instructor slashed it with red marks and threw it in a wastebasket. He and JP picked up a larger mattress from an empty apartment filled with “tiny tiny rooms like for midgets.” He was reading Lautréamont’s Maldoror, in English of course.
During his nine months in France, David worked on his journal nearly every day. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
He wrote to two French publishers, Nidra Poller at Soleil Noir and Christian Bourgois at Editions Christian Bourgois, asking for work and making queries about their possible interest in the monologues. It took just two days for a rejection letter to arrive from Bourgois. But Poller invited him to make an appointment, “to talk about your writing and your situation in Paris,” she said.
He also had a letter from Sylvia Pogorzalek in Bonn, whom he’d queried earlier. She’d published German editions of works by Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine. She would find it difficult to publish an unknown, Pogorzalek wrote, but would be interested in seeing the manuscript. Maybe a piece of it would work for her magazine, Gasolin. David spent two days preparing a cover letter, then almost immediately regretted spending the seven francs postage. That could have bought two chocolate bars.
On December 4, he met with Nidra Poller, “a great woman.” They talked for two hours. It was probably the first literary-philosophical conversation he’d had since coming to Paris. “I did it all shakily, not having had that kinda contact in a long time,” he wrote, “also not having spoken on the book before.” She pronounced herself interested in looking at the manuscript, but knew of no work prospects.
Where and how could he even look for a job without knowing French? The American embassy? He actually tried there. JP had made no demands of him; David just didn’t like being dependent. As he explained in a letter to Dennis DeForge, “Being dependent on people always hooks into the Times Square senses, even though it’s not the same. That’s a sense I may never rid myself of.”
He began a series of drawings in hopes of getting a gallery interested, getting “some food money rolling in.” One drawing showed a huge dog walking behind mountains “filled with planets, stars, peep holes, rays, lines, lightning bolts, rain and the most obsessively pure eyes I’ve ever drawn. The mountains have huge reptile/hieroglyph carvings in them.” He called the piece Night Arrives on the Mayan Coastline, and felt he’d had a kind of breakthrough. “I finally figured out how to draw black and white mountains; mountains that wouldn’t be flat and signboard hollywoodian looking.” He hated the thought of selling this. He liked it. Indeed, with its Western landscape, animal presence, and cosmic symbols, it’s the first drawing he ever did that seems connected to the mythic style he later developed.
In his journal, late in December, he drew what looked like a Dürer wing, probably because he’d dreamt of a birdman—human legs and wings for arms, “sad man’s eye’s, gnashing beak as if he’s trying to get out of bird appearance.” He wanted to describe it to Brian, who’d been with him in the dream. But the wing was a prescient image to inscribe, as it would figure later in his life.
By the end of 1978, he’d stopped looking for a job. He would drop his French class after a month or two (by JP’s estimate). And he never did tour the Paris galleries to try to interest them in his work.
On New Year’s Eve, he dreamt that he’d joined the army or navy—he didn’t know which—and they ordered him into a helicopter, flew him over the Arctic, and threw him out. He crashed through the ice, only to be rescued via rope and taken back to America.
Nidra Poller sent David a letter early in January 1979 to say that she saw the monologues as a writing exercise, “an apprencticeship to the craft.” She wrote, “I feel like there’s no poetry to be distilled from these experiences, that they are lived with a language so minimal that to enrich it would be a betrayal of the reality. And I think that is a serious dilemma for the writer. Barren soil. I wonder what you think?” While David had plenty of thoughts, he did not answer immediately.
In Normandy for the last time at the end of February, he was still pondering what he called her question on why he loved “sleeping thugs and wandering men and women who made nothing of their lives.” His handwritten draft was tucked into a journal with an empty envelope from Bonn, probably another rejection, and he wrote in such a rush of emotion that it’s hard to decipher, apart from lines like “the sleeping thug represents a sense of life more important to me than whatever I have learned of my own so far.”
He would give up, for the time being, on trying to place the monologues.
He’d begun “a personal notebook of drawings,” each maybe four inches by three of “pure bloody madness,” with many of the images drawn from dreams. This would be the visual equivalent of automatic writing—permission to draw anything, to let go. He felt he had an internal censor “constantly at work prodding vision/image with a subtle ‘no.’ “ Certainly the whole journey to Paris had been about giving himself a jolt, a way to remove himself from internal restraints.
He also began the practice, continued for the rest of his life, of writing instructions to himself. In regard to the street novel, for example: “Walk the streets and accept the return of those senses and return home and push them through the typewriter.”
He felt that his writing had changed. “The continual silence here, the lack of creative American-style energy and dreams has slowed me down and calmed my writings,” he said in a letter to Ensslin. Still, he was far from done with surrealism, an art form made for the removal of internal restraint.
He wondered if he should rewrite the street novel in symbolist language.
He wrote song lyrics like “Louis Bunuel / … can ya enter this cell / take a cinematic photograph of my soundless scream / cut the eye, make it die, before it starts to dream.”
He outlined ideas for a piece on “a hallucinated America,” another “supportive glimpse into the netherworld,” but this time using dreams.
He began a project called “the Bolt book,”d dreams again, plus emotionally charged moments from his journals, and surreal stories combined with images.
He completed none of these projects.
But he was beginning to find bits of his visual vocabulary. In 1991, David would create what he very consciously decided would be his last piece, a photograph of his own face partly buried in loose dirt. In the Bolt book, in 1979, he wrote what seems to be a description of it: “I am the face beneath the sand still breathing while day pulls down from the sky, and I leaned back thinking he should have guaranteed entrance into heaven.”
He knew he would have to leave Paris. His love for JP was the only thing holding him there.
He was having many dreams about the American West and wanted to make another cross-country trip. He missed the wildness of New York. In Paris, he’d observed, “the only anarchy I see is in the public parks after dusk; the ballet of pick-ups and pickpockets, Arabs runnin’ from the police … hoods and local toughs playing soccer with beer cans … dreaming ladies walking their poodles in the midst of all this.” He noted in a letter to Ensslin that France had now discovered the Beats and “wished it was fifties all over again.” He described boys hanging out around Saint-Michel in slicked-back James Dean haircuts and leather jackets with Elvis Presley buttons. He was very aware of missing the cultural moment in New York—the club energy, “schizo-culture,” and what was left of punk. He wanted to be part of that vibrant, growing scene. Also, he wasn’t sure the change in his writing was for the better.
Left unsaid was the fact that David just missed his friends. On February 21, he woke up with a shout, sweating and frightened. Michael Morais! David had dreamt that he’d walked into an upstairs room where Michael was sleeping. Suddenly a spirit entered, mostly invisible though he saw “bare folds of clothing.” David felt an overwhelming chill and terror. He suppressed a scream, then saw Michael sit up zombie-like with a luminous yellow blaze behind his eyes, then a flicker as if something was falling inside his head past his eyes—like a window shutting. David then saw that Brian was asleep in another bed, and while the “thing” went straight into Michael, its close proximity to Brian made him groan as if in pain. David got up wondering if Michael had died and immediately wrote him a letter. Brian too. He apologized for feeling susceptible to dream imagery and symbols; he’d been reading Jung. But the dream had truly frightened him and left him in a fog for a week. Michael wrote back to say that on February 22 his wife had given birth to a stillborn baby.
David walked to the Seine just about every day to observe: an interesting rock, a bandaged hobo, another who’d made a pillow of two Tintin books. That spring the river overflowed, throwing up pieces of crockery that stayed on the banks when the water receded. David found a bottle with a waterproof cap. He wrote his name and Brian’s on a piece of paper with the words “the sea revolving in the eye of the horse, the distances of the forest in the eye of the fish,” then sealed it in the bottle and tossed it into the current.
David working at his sister’s apartment on rue Laferrière, Paris. (Courtesy of Jean Pierre Delage)
That March both Pat and Pillu got work that took them out of the country, so David moved back into their place. Nothing had changed between him and JP, but Pat’s studio was roomier, with better light, and she had a dog for him to walk.
Just before moving in, he completed the first collage that would remain part of his oeuvre, Bill Burroughs’ Recurring Dream—using a photo of Burroughs bought in a Left Bank shop and an image of a centipede bought from a Seine stall.
In March, he made a drawing of a man in a suit falling onto some tracks, based on a warning sign posted everywhere in the Paris Metro. This later became one of David’s stencils and an image sprayed onto many walls in Lower Manhattan.
On March 30, he drew Rimbaud J.O. Study #1 in pencil, with the poet clothed, and at the end of April he made a colored-pencil version, Rimbaud Masturbation Study #2, with the poet naked.
Bill Burroughs’ Recurring Dream, 1979. Collage, 6½ ×7 inches. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
Surely David had seen the cheap newsprint Rimbaud posters plastered everywhere in Paris in 1978—79. French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest had attached the famous 1871 photo of the poet’s head (then on the cover of Illuminations) to a photo of a leather-jacketed young man with a coat or perhaps a bundle thrown over his shoulder. The posters were life-size and plastered on walls, phone booths, and billboards. David would begin photographing his Rimbaud in New York series during the summer of ’79.
By the beginning of April he’d made no solid plan to leave Paris, only knew that he had to. Sometime during the first week of that month, he met an Englishman his own age in the Tuileries and took him back to Pat’s place for sex. It was the first time since meeting Jean Pierre that he’d had sex with someone else, and he did it very consciously. “It was sort of a removal point.” To help him leave JP.
Still, he made excuses to himself about what a “breakthrough” it was to go to bed with someone his own age. Usually his lovers were older, and he liked that maturity, the extra years of reflection those guys had behind them. Plus, the age difference created an inherent separation. Making love with someone like this Englishman, Alan—that was frightening, but now he’d overcome it.
He made plans to meet Alan again, on April 10. But he decided he’d better tell JP. He fretted over this for a couple of days. Maybe he was wrong. But “then came senses of myself as a human being who needed freedom to do exactly what he desired in way of contact, sexual or otherwise.” So he told Jean Pierre, I’m having dinner with this guy, and I’m sleeping with him. He was still committed to JP, but he said, “I … just need to explore things as they move my way.” JP told him he had to feel free to do as he wished. Though David worried whether JP truly understood.
The night with Alan was almost comical, and completely foolish. First, David got lost trying to find the right street. Alan had a student room on the seventh floor at the top of a creaking staircase, and down dank hallways with dripping pipes. When David arrived, Alan was in red rubber gloves, chopping celery and apples for their meal. He struggled out of one to shake David’s hand. David took a wobbly chair, noted the crumb-littered rug, the tiny cot, and the skylight with one broken pane. They listened to the BBC news while Alan finished chopping fruit and vegetables and poured nuts over them: their dinner. David knew immediately that he and Alan weren’t clicking. “At one point I wanted to leave quite badly.” But he wouldn’t. He’d told JP he was going to spend the night; therefore he would. Alan’s bed was so small that David felt he couldn’t move an inch without falling out. He lay there—rain tapping his head through the broken skylight, a cat yowling in the alley, his thoughts on JP. Alan, meanwhile, wondered if David would be interested in a threesome next time.
Not really.
At six, David got up and scurried back to Jean Pierre, picking up a croissant for him on the way. They exchanged ça va’s and sat down to coffee. JP told him he was making plans to go to the shore for a week by himself. He needed some time alone.
They didn’t discuss the affair for another three days. JP then admitted that it had hurt his feelings. David admitted that he hadn’t enjoyed it, but he would not apologize. Though he concluded that “all this shoulda been spared from the typewriter,” David not only typed it—he also pasted it into his journal. And when JP went off for his week of vacation, he took David with him.
David’s relationship with Jean Pierre would prove to be one of the two major love affairs of his life, yet for all his talk of “emotional commitment,” it seems likely that he allowed himself to fall in love with JP (and actually write about him in his journal) because he knew from the start that it would have to end. He’d never taken any step needed to stay in Paris.
For all his talk of needing to “explore things” moving his way, David sometimes wondered whether to trust his instincts. While he did not want to continue a sexual relationship with Alan, he thought they could socialize. Alan gave him a book, Christopher and His Kind, in which David immediately found two quotes to support him in what he’d done.
Author Christopher Isherwood had seized upon the same quotes: “There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature.” (This from anthropologist John Layard, who seems to have picked it up from psychologist Homer Lane.) Isherwood was talking about his decision to go to Berlin in 1929. To go there to meet boys. When he meets one who becomes a magical figure for him and he can’t explain why, Isherwood tells himself what he thinks Layard would have said—and this was a major one for David: “Anything one invents about oneself is part of one’s personal myth and therefore true.”
For one thing, this eased David’s mind about the “fiction” he’d included in letters to friends, “the distortion or make up of events—for entertaining reasons or for reasons illustrating senses.”
Like writing in a letter that he’d met JP “leanin against the midnight doors of the Louvre” instead of “in a bush”? After reading many letters, both those pasted into the journal and those gathered from friends, that seems a typical distortion.
The bigger truth-telling issue he had at this point was with Brian. He had written to him about JP on the Nico poster, but never mailed that—or any other letter explaining that he had a new boyfriend. Brian thought David was still at his sister’s place, where he continued to get his mail. In fact, David was coy with many friends about Jean Pierre. “Mon ami,” he would call him. My friend.
On April 25, David talked to Brian on the phone for ten minutes, and they made a plan. Brian would arrive in Paris for a visit on May 7. They would return to New York together on June 1.
David admitted to the journal that he was feeling nervous, feeling strange—maybe because Brian was coming. And he was depressed about leaving JP. Into that emotional mélange dropped a mind-blowing letter from John Hall, who confessed that he was having fantasies about making love with David. He currently had a girlfriend but was interested in exploring his “homosexual aspect.” He’d never said this to another man, he wrote, adding, “I hope this isn’t anything heavy for you.”
David was startled but took it in stride. Sex was easy for David, something he could always handle without self-consciousness or awkwardness. It’s the emotions that were hard, though distance from the person in question made them easier. His reply to John Hall was gracious and thoughtful. “Its a damn nice compliment in the form of trust that you’ve given me,” David wrote. “It really brought about some intense feelings on this end, a sense of gladness that you felt comfortable enough to share those feelings with me.” David told Hall of the fear he’d had about coming out to him, how he’d never allowed himself “to consider you in a sexual way,” so now he would have to push back that sense—but sure, David would like to make love to him. “I just see so many things arising from it and want you to understand some of them before we attempt it.” There was a possibility that Hall wouldn’t like it, and if it was his first time, it had to be approached “openly and with talk and also with the idea that if you feel uncomfortable at any point then we don’t go on.… The most pressing thought I have is that I don’t want anything to get in the way of our friendship.” Plus Hall needed to think about his relationships with women. David had always thought it difficult to do both at once.
Meanwhile, post-Alan, he’d gone back to cruising. Just a bit. And it was just sex, without emotion or expectation. Most interesting is the way he writes about it. As if observing from a little outside himself, where he connects this moment to a wider world. This is his voice—or it’s getting to be: the directness of the monologues infused with reflection, the result no doubt of his many months of forced introspection and day after day of tapping that keyboard:
Standing in the semi darkness of a strangers room, shadow light on blue walls blue lamp blue blankets and sliding blue sheets, pulling on my dusty pro keds dirty rubber sides, dirty laces, socks all smudgy dirty, pants ill fitting, shirt green and too big neck space slipping over shoulder blade, underwear fulla holes and the elastic broken smell of perspiration I look at my hands, my chest, my young arms and lazy stomach muscles and think of age and rest and movement and drawings, think of my rimbaud masturbation drawings while some guy in another room is talking about how he’s heading for rio then on to the islands and later spain itlay Greece oh Greece is so fabulous this time of year and then mexico in the fall and he’s waiting for me to get dressed, we’ve just made love and when I’ve gone to fuck him he says: oh I’m not sure I’m perfect down there—me wonderin if that means the clap or what and in a few minutes we’re to get into his Mercedes down in sub basement level two of this monolithic highrise … what things can I write about anymore what with all my senses having swung towards the exploration of sensuality and sexuality and the images the symbols the refracting light off object and flesh movement beneath clothes light covers and trees, in dark rainy doorways, from the corner windows of autos, in silhouette passing gardens in the misty night, along rivers where once I made love to a hobo down there young guy with his tiny fire beneath tunnel and rough face weathered and old clothes with musty smell and thinking about the changes of time and circumstance; reflecting on lovemaking with that almost penniless character and now this guy with his south-american suntan afric chairs greek statues and gold Egyptian ashtrays with ceramic beetles climbing the sides and what of it all matters really in this strange sense of just the world of solitary character being made up of transient moments in all levels and walks and how little important most of it seems in hindsight.
All through the journals—and this piece is no exception—he has written with no cross-outs, no words added in margins, no second thoughts.
David met Brian at Gare du Nord on May 7. JP cooked dinner for them at rue Laferrière. (Pat and Pillu were still out of town.) Then Brian turned in, suffering from jet lag.
The next day, David took Brian to Versailles. Out where Marie Antoinette used to play at milking the cows, he informed Brian that he was really in love with Jean Pierre. And—so sorry I asked you to come. This shameful incident David “spared from the typewriter.” He never mentioned it, and Brian never forgot it.
“I won’t say I was misled, because I went into every direction in my life, including him, with my eyes open,” Brian said. “But—he wrote such loving letters—‘You have to come, you have to stay with me, I miss you so much.’ He was often confused about things. If he’d said, ‘I’m involved with someone in Paris but I love you too, so come over,’ I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.” Brian took a train out of town for probably a day, in romantic despair, then returned.
“I was not a very jealous person,” he said. “How could you be in the seventies? Everyone was fucking everyone.” Also, he thought JP was nice and “very entertaining.”
David moved Jean Pierre into Pat’s apartment with him. Brian would stay alone over at JP’s place. By May 10, David was showing Brian his favorite spots—like Pont des Arts, a footbridge leading from the Louvre to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and of course, the Tuileries. There they even got to experience a police raid and clamber over a fence.
That weekend, JP drove them to Vaux le Vicomte, a castle thirty-five miles from Paris. “A royal bore,” David thought, but not a total loss. He was able to photograph a dead and bloated rat. He was doing the tourist things he hadn’t done in nine months of living in France. Like the visit to Père Lachaise, the final resting place of many artistic heroes: Gertrude and Alice, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Molière, Chopin, La Fontaine. Brian took a picture (much reprinted since) of David next to Apollinaire’s grave, holding his head to mimic the head wound that led to the poet’s premature death.
David visited Père Lachaise cemetery with Brian Butterick, where they took turns posing at the graves of cultural heroes. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
One night as he, JP, and Brian hung out, the tension got to David, who said, “so long,” and rushed to the nearest Metro, willing to go anywhere. There, on a train, he witnessed a robbery, and it left him feeling nauseated. The psychic tension that entered the car with the thieves, the practiced motions, the weary tourists they’d robbed—farmer types in their Sunday best. It only added to the emotional overload.
He couldn’t quite parse everything he was feeling in those last days in Paris but told himself he felt rearranged. On May 31, he sat down, crying, to write Jean Pierre a goodbye letter, then rushed outside to walk, feeling displaced, “seeing so suddenly my faults laid bare, how I coulda done it all differently.” JP had gone back to his place on Bourdonnais, so David took the letter there, with a painted rock JP had particularly liked. He sat tensely as JP read the letter for what seemed to him a long time. Was the English too difficult? Finally, Jean Pierre told him it was beautiful. “We embraced and held each other as strongly as possible. [JP] said, ‘I never told you how much I love you because I was afraid to make it too heavy. I thought you might one day leave and I didn’t want it to be difficult.’ I held him and felt such a harsh love for him, a thick fist rising in my throat. He said, ‘You know I’m sad you go back to America, but I’m happy I had the chance to love you for this time.” They both cried.
The reentry into Brooklyn was such a shock. He and Brian took a cab to Court Street through the clattering din, the grainy night light, the filthy chaotic streets. New York—he felt a sense of “almost horror” at being part of the place again.
