He liked painting directly on the world. It was a gesture of defiance—this work done on some decrepit pier or busy intersection or gallery door, this work destined to be destroyed. For his first one-man show at Civilian Warfare, David painted or printed everything on found materials: driftwood, garbage can lids, supermarket posters. And this too was a way of responding to official reality—to what he would later call “the pre-invented world.”
He’d been stenciling on garbage can lids since sometime in 1982. Various friends remembered walking the neighborhood with him when he confiscated a lid, or scouted for good ones to take. He wanted them aged or dented so they looked like they had a history. According to Chuck Nanney, it was Hujar who got him to always replace what he was taking, who told him the super would have to do it otherwise out of his own pocket. So David went to the hardware store and bought a new lid to replace each one he took.
In spring of 1983, David spent a day at Jones Beach with Keith Davis and Elayne Kling, a friend of Keith’s who was then working at Fun Gallery. Keith brought a big bag of tempera paint with him. “We spent the day picking up pieces of driftwood and painting them these crazy colors,” Kling said. Then they built a monolith from these vivid logs, a huge haphazard structure that attracted spectators from way down the beach. At the end of the day, they packed as much painted driftwood as they could fit into Kling’s car. At the last minute, she grabbed one that David had turned into an alligator but left behind. “I’m keeping this,” she told him. She’s certain that this was the day David first began making his driftwood totems, though, as Kling put it, “he expanded on them back at the studio.” Indeed, the finished pieces were complex—often stylized snakes or fish painted with the iconography he’d been developing: globes, targets, cowboys, falling men, and so on.
David had left the storefront on Houston Street early in ’83 for a studio at the Clocktower, a gallery and studio space affiliated with P.S. 1 but located in Lower Manhattan. He was also working at Keith’s loft on Suffolk Street. Keith had silk-screening equipment and technical expertise, and he loved being part of the process. “Keith always had art supplies around,” said Steve Doughton, who was close to both Keith and David in the mid-eighties. “He was always encouraging people to come over. ‘Paint something, and I’ll put it on my wall.’ He had a little workshop. I remember them printing the food posters there.” In his wanderings, David had found the place where supermarkets had their big window ads made. He told Steve Doughton that he’d watched the guys work and admired their skill, their speed, “just whipping off these stencils freehand with X-Acto knives, cutting into some kind of transfer medium.” When Elayne Kling came in one day to help Keith and David print both the Romulus and Remus piece (True Myth, on ads for Domino sugar and Kraft grape jelly) and Jean Genet Masturbating Metteray Prison (on an ad for ground chuck), she saw that they had boxes of those food posters.
More than half the images in that first solo Civilian show were printed or painted on these posters. Savarin Coffee, for example, re-creates frames from the pier cartoon that ended with the word bubble “Every day my mind grows keener …” Tuna features a cowboy outlaw, and Slam Click, a man in a prison cell printed over deli ads. David explained years later that he’d used the food posters because they marked a specific time (with their prices) and represented consumption—moral, mental, psychic, and physical consumption. The supermarket ads represent the wallpaper of our lives, while the unspeakable surfaces in David’s images of violence, repression, and desire.
David complained that, during his first show, someone at the Milliken Gallery had said to him: “Why can’t you be like Keith Haring—full of fun?” David’s work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He painted distress. Soldiers and bombers. Falling buildings and junkies. His images had the tension of some niceness opened up to its ruined heart. In the montage style he began to develop, David would expose the Real Deal under the artifacts—wars and rumors of wars, industrial wastelands, mythological beasts, and the evolutionary spectrum from dinosaur to humanity’s rough beast.
The Civilian Warfare show opened on June 4, 1983—the day of the police raid on Pier 34.
Between the end of 1982 and the end of ’83, David had three one-man shows at three galleries—Milliken, Civilian, and Hal Bromm—while also participating in fourteen group exhibitions, not including the Ward Line Pier Project. In the context of the eighties art boom, this was not so unusual. Artists like Basquiat, Haring, and Schnabel were selling work as fast as they could crank it out. Still, after years of struggle, David was suddenly attracting attention. He would be written about now. He would become a public figure.
This brought him up against one of the central dilemmas in his life: How much could he say? What could he reveal?
Hujar always said that an artist should have an artificial biography. As Vince Aletti explained, Hujar thought such factoids did not matter. Because who really cared? “So he had fun often just making up some kind of slightly believable but odd early history for himself. Each bio was slightly different.” On the CV he prepared for his last show, for example, Hujar said that he’d been born in Cairo.
This was also an era when many in the art world—Lydia Lunch, Gracie Mansion, Sur Rodney Sur—played with their identities or flat out reinvented themselves. But there’s a light, jokey touch to Hujar’s fakery, and a kind of cheekiness to the name changes, while David was engaged in creating camouflage. He’d entered a world where he felt like an alien, acutely aware of being uneducated and working class. He told me he’d felt intimidated at Milliken. He wasn’t his own idea of what an artist should be. He thought his work at this point was raw and rudimentary. Hujar pushed him to show it anyway.
David began to create an image for public consumption that wasn’t quite who he really was. He simplified his story. He took real events and moved them back in time to make them more terrible. He began crafting this persona right from the first show at Milliken. He would be the street kid, the abused child. A draft of the press release from the Milliken gallery states that David’s visual language is informed by world events, but that this is filtered through “his own survival experience, which includes his leaving home and going out on [sic] the world alone at the age of nine.” The biographical statement on page two says he came to New York at nine and left home a year later. He revised the age he left for the streets in later versions. But, while David actually moved to Manhattan when he was eleven, he always said he was nine—including in sworn testimony given in U.S. District Court in 1990 when he sued the American Family Association.
David told me that he’d discussed hustling early on because it would have helped him when he was younger to know that someone else in his world shared his frame of reference. But then he said, “There was an element of mythmaking, which I can’t say I’m not responsible for. Also I think [the hustling story] was used by some people to hit me over the head and by others to find me very attractive on some level.” There’s nothing in Milliken’s press release about hustling. Or Civilian’s. David was unusual in speaking about it at all. Early in the eighties, artists who had worked in any part of the sex industry were just beginning to admit it or use it as subject matter, and women (like Diane Torr with “Go-Go Girls Seize Control,” 1981) led the way.
Keith Davis interviewed David, probably in spring ’83, because as the tape begins, they’re discussing work that ended up in the June show at Civilian. (“Ol’ Romulus and Remie,” David says. “Looks good.”) Keith wanted to help David in any way he could, and he’d wangled some kind of interview assignment. It never appeared in print, but Keith tells him, “They want me to ask you questions about symbols in your work. The kind of information I want to get at is what aspects of your life experience indicate how authentic your images are.”
This was the first interview David ever did. Several minutes in, he tells a couple of—well, they have to be jokes, but Keith doesn’t take them that way. First, David says he used to hitch into New York City to ride “the elevated” in second grade. An incredulous Keith replies, “Second grade?” Then David tells him he started hustling in third grade. “This bunch of farmers that had a club down at the end of this wheat field near my block used to pay me to jump out of birthday cakes, get it on with half the farmers. Who were widowers, because their wives had died chopping down twenty-seven truckloads of hay every day.” That one is rather perversely funny, but Keith doesn’t laugh. He just says, “Third grade?” Yes, and Bob Dylan began traveling with a carnival at the age of thirteen (as he used to tell interviewers). David never told these whoppers again.
Keith recorded a couple of hours of conversation, David talking about Times Square, about being a kid on the lam, telling many of the same stories he would tell other interviewers over the years, including me. He has the same affect with Keith that he has in the Biographical Dateline printed in the Tongues of Flame catalog. Hard-bitten. Blasé. As if he’d been through hell and he didn’t care. He tells Keith he left home at age nine or ten. But when Keith asks why, he ducks the question. He starts talking about how his brother ended up in a boys’ home. As for his mother, he says, “There were times that I’d just walk out of the house for the night, and my mother would be screaming her head off for something, and I’d just say whatever I said and just take off and end up somewhere down around Times Square getting picked up by some guy.” (That could have happened—when he was fifteen or sixteen, not nine or ten.) He does not say much else about life at the Hells Kitchen apartment except that home was unstable. That’s what he would reveal to a good friend. It’s more than most interviewers got.
In August, he met with Robert Pincus-Witten for an Arts magazine article. The writer found David to be “diffident and taciturn” and wondered “how much of his uneasy manner consciously plays to a myth in formation.” That same day, Pincus-Witten also visited artist Stephen Frailey, whom he described, by way of contrast, as a “privileged boy at his ease.” Still, he was unsure what to make of David and his evasions. “To build a sociology around him is awkward—to infer it, easy—as the few facts offered up are of such high profile,” Pincus-Witten wrote. “I don’t for a moment doubt them, though scads are glossed. He’s been on his own since childhood, rejected by a New Jersey family at nine. From what little he says (that’s a problem: he hints, not to be flirtatious, but to maintain distance), he had no use for them and they apparently had even less for him. Survival was dependent on itinerancy and vagabondage.… A reasonable model is Genet.”
I think there’s a simple explanation for David’s “mythology.” He did not want to talk about living family members. It was too complicated and too painful. Instead, he followed the outline he’d established in the unfinished “street novel” he’d written in Paris. Discuss the brutal father, now conveniently dead, and go directly to Times Square. In the novel, he’s a runaway with no siblings and a mother who’s disappeared, while the dad he flees is clearly modeled on his own.
Coincidently, by the time David did these first solo shows and first interviews, he was completely out of touch with everyone in his family, including his sister. Unknown to him, Pat had remarried that year and moved. He would visit Paris in early ’84 and not be able to find her. David had not seen his brother, Steven, since their father’s funeral in ’76. He’d called his half-brother, Pete, one night from the Peppermint Lounge, just to tell him how much he hated the job. That was the first time Pete had heard from David in years, and they would have no further contact until late in 1991.
Susan Gauthier, who still saw David occasionally, was one of the first people David had ever opened up to about his past, and probably one of the few to get the real story. Hustling? Yes, but not till his teen years. “He put out there what he wanted people to believe, and he wanted to be something of an enigma,” Gauthier said. “He had fun with it. He really didn’t want people to know who he was. So he was very aware of what he was doing. He wanted to be a puzzle that nobody could figure out.”
By the end of his life, David had a reputation as someone who would speak out and hold nothing back. When it came to politics—absolutely. I think people also had the impression that he was telling “everything” because he spoke so freely about sex. But sex was easy for him to talk about, and it wasn’t everything. He never told everything.
Artist James Romberger popped into the Civilian Warfare storefront to show his drawings to Dean Savard, probably in the fall of ’83. Savard wasn’t there. But down on the floor was someone who looked like a lumberjack: David in a flannel shirt, hacking at a log with a hatchet. David put down the totem-in-progress and said, “I’ll look at your work.” He liked Romberger’s stuff. He thought Civilian should show it. He’d mention it to Savard. James Romberger and David were destined to work together later in various ways. But the point here is that David took an almost proprietary interest in Civilian Warfare. Its funky confines felt like home, and he wanted the place to succeed.
Alan Barrows (left) and Dean Savard outside Civilian Warfare Gallery on East Eleventh Street. Barrows has a “friendly cow” patch on his sweater and one of David’s burning house stencils is visible on the window. The sculpture is by Greer Lankton. The gallery’s sign includes three stencils of Hujar. (Photograph by Marion Scemama)
He and Keith Davis made a distinctive sign for the exterior of the storefront—no name, but three squares, each with a stencil of Hujar. David had also brought Marisa Cardinale to the gallery in early ’83 and told Savard to hire her.
Marisa had been working at the Second Stage Theater as “assistant to the assistant to the assistant stage manager,” as she put it. She knew David from the Kiev, a cheap Ukrainian restaurant on Second Avenue where she always seemed to run into some combination of him, Hujar, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Apparently David just had a feeling about her: This person is competent; this person is responsible. Marisa had an art history degree but no gallery experience, and she admitted to being a terrible typist. At Civilian, that would not matter. They had no typewriter. Savard wrote everything out by hand on the Civilian Warfare stationery they made at the Xerox shop.
The gallery also had no record-keeping system, and when Marisa started, Savard was still living there. Marisa said that David brought her in because “they had started to make some money, and it was all just sort of disappearing.” David was already worried about getting paid.
It was an era when things could be tried, and there was space for the tryout. So photographer Allen Frame and multimedia artist Kirsten Bates decided to form a theater company called Turmoil and began looking for material. Bill Rice suggested that they look at David’s Sounds in the Distance.
Rice had been acquainted with David for years, and he thought the monologues “stunning.” Rice was a painter and an actor, a sort of underground renaissance man. A few years older than Hujar, he’d somehow found his niche in the so-called Blank Generation. He began acting in no-wave films when he was almost fifty, working with Scott and Beth B, Amos Poe, and Jim Jarmusch. He would soon find his way, with David, into Richard Kern’s Cinema of Transgression. Onstage he appeared in plays by downtown luminaries like John Jesurun, Jim Neu, and Gary Indiana. Meanwhile, he was in the midst of compiling some two thousand pages of notes on Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, determined to prove that it was originally based on men. For his day job, he worked as a researcher on a scholarly study of Gertrude Stein. By 1983, he was one of about three tenants left in a building at 13 East Third Street, across from the men’s shelter, and he’d opened his backyard to underground theater by writers like Indiana. That summer, Rice decided to open his “garden” again, and Turmoil hoped to work there.
When Bates approached David for permission to use Sounds in the Distance, he seemed, she said “taken aback.” By the time he met Frame, he’d apparently gotten used to the idea. Frame said, “David was very excited about having us adapt it but wanted to be hands-off. He hadn’t had any experience in theater.” Bates and Frame worked together to adapt and direct eight of the monologues. They called it Turmoil in the Garden. David could barely stand to watch. He got Kern to come with him and they crawled into an abandoned building near Rice’s backyard and watched from a fire escape. Apparently that got him past his embarrassment, since he came twice more and sat in the audience. Frame said he seemed “captivated.”
Rice’s backyard was mostly broken asphalt sheltered by a few ailanthus trees, and accessible through his apartment. Frame and Bates experimented with the staging. One performer delivered a monologue from a fire escape. Their cast included Nan Goldin, her then-boyfriend Brian Burchill, and Rice himself. They lit the small space using extension cords strung over backyards from the La Mama theater on Fourth Street. The garden had room for about fifteen lawn chairs, folding chairs, and broken-down seating scrounged from the street.
Inside his emptying building, Rice had commandeered one of the vacant apartments to use as an exhibition space. It was more salon than gallery, since it wasn’t open to the public. David became one of many artists who showed work at those soirées.
Carlo McCormick met David at the Pyramid Club, during Pet Night. David had entered a cock-a-bunny in the contest for the most horrible pet. Carlo recalled someone else entering a ferret. And maybe someone had a rat. Any dog in the contest would have been ugly, or, as Carlo put it, “a breed associated with bottom-feeders.” He remembered Pet Night as an event the Pyramid sponsored “to celebrate the squalor and poverty of our lives.” Carlo had seen the “Hit and Run” show at Civilian with David, Savard, and Bronson Eden. And he’d attended the opening of “The Beast Show,” where he’d seen guards chasing cock-a-bunnies. (He was sure David had brought in hundreds.) So he approached him at the Pyramid. “I was like, ‘My god, you’re David,’ but David didn’t like people doing that to him. He jumped out of his skin.”
Carlo—who quickly became a major critic, curator, and promoter of the East Village scene—wrote his first piece for the East Village Eye on the closing of the Ward Line pier, and one of his first reviews on David’s show at Civilian (“homoerotic and dramatic urban and military images done with skill and energy”). The Eye had not reviewed neighborhood galleries before this.
Midway through ’83, however, the scene had begun to solidify and would not be ignored again, with the Eye functioning as house organ. When Club 57 closed that spring, the performance scene also moved into a new phase, as 57’s trash-and-vaudeville ambience spread to other venues. Its stars had no trouble finding gigs elsewhere, but in the East Village they tended to play at the Pyramid Club. In July, for example, the Eye reported on John Sex singing “Only the Lonely” there with his pet boa constrictor Delilah draped around his torso. Ann Magnuson could pack the place practically on word of mouth alone.
That same month, Carlo curated an event for Limbo Lounge, a tiny club on the north side of Tompkins Square Park: fourteen consecutive one-night, one-person shows. David was one of the artists (as were Mike Bidlo, Keiko Bonk, and Rhonda Zwillinger, for example), and here one could definitely smoke (or drink or vomit) in front of a painting.
The East Village was the art world’s surly teenager, ready to tromp all over the unspoken etiquette established in “grown-up” galleries. No one would walk into Leo Castelli’s space and ask, “How much is that Rauschenberg?” It wasn’t done. Money and status were the elephants in such rooms where top dealers sold top artists to top collectors. In the East Village, prices were discussed right up front. Often you could get something for fifty or a hundred dollars. A completely sold-out Rodney Alan Greenblat show at Gracie Mansion had work starting at five dollars. I once saw a dealer get work out of some dinky back room, spread it over the floor, and ask, “Is this the right size? Want something in blue?” Then, the East Village galleries were not just open on Sunday—but that was their big day. At openings, most of the artgoers were actually out in the street, since so few could fit inside. And at Civilian, Savard always served vodka, never white wine. What was not yet called “branding” revolved around such superficialities. At the same time, the whole East Village setup was a critique of elitism. When I wrote, in 1984, about what was happening in my neighborhood, I declared that new ideas were being explored here about what a collector, a dealer, an artist, and a gallery could be. Looking at it after more than twenty-five years, I’m not sure anything really changed. The art world has a magical ability to absorb every critique, and make money on it.
Sur Rodney Sur and Gracie Mansion outside the gallery on East Tenth Street. She is wearing the evening gown to which Mike Bildo added Jackson Pollock drips. (Photograph © Andreas Sterzing)
Ultimately 176 galleries would open in the neighborhood (not all at once, obviously). Landlords were eagerly endorsing this unlikely trend by offering former bodegas and social clubs—and sometimes apartments for the dealers—at remarkably low rents. I’ll never forget the young dealer who took me to her filthy, unheated apartment a few doors away from her gallery, served me instant Bustelo in a dirty cup, and then announced, “This is how we live on the Lower East Side.” She’d lived there for six months, after growing up on the Upper East Side. Poverty was apparently a cool new lifestyle, but it wouldn’t be for long. As this dealer proudly declared, “We’re raising the property values.”
Gracie Mansion had started her career as a dealer by looking at the mechanisms involved in presenting and selling art, and she set up another sly commentary in September ’83 with her “Sofa/Painting” show. Because when you’re not elitist, you end up dealing with art buyers at the other end of the spectrum, those who say, “I need something that looks good over the sofa.”
David was one of the six artists she invited to create both a sofa and a painting to hang above it. She gave each artist twenty-five or fifty dollars to help in the purchase of a couch. David found one on the street—a legless banquette that might have come from a diner. He set it on two milk cartons. On the seat he placed a piece of Plexiglas, covered on one side with his complaint about the art world. Yes, he already had one: Too many people wanted to show him. Or, were “trying to seduce him,” as Gracie put it. That meant Civilian and Gracie and Hal Bromm. On the other side of the Plexiglas he obscured those words by painting red, green, and white branchlike forms along with a screaming head and a small image of his own head. On the back of the sofa, he painted a cityscape in black and yellow, with a globe in the sky. The painting on the wall above the sofa showed a figure climbing a tree with one stump of a branch. “It’s him, trying to get away from all of us,” Gracie explained.
David sold work in 1983 through all three of the galleries named and blamed above, earning a total of almost seventeen thousand dollars. He had a gross income of about twenty-six thousand dollars in ’84, but he was never rich. As usual, he embodied contradiction: he was irritated by the art world; he was also relieved that he finally had a way to make a living and worried that the whole thing could evaporate at any moment.
David’s strange relationship with money began to manifest as soon as he made some. He would give it away without a second thought to a needy friend. Then sometimes, he’d be nearly broke again. He had no concept of financial planning. He never had a savings account. He never had an IRA. He did not have a credit card until almost 1990. Near the end of his life, he confessed to a friend that he had never known how to balance a checkbook. If possible, he would have avoided using money altogether. He preferred trading. He certainly would not consider making art just for money. But then, he wanted the purity of that intention to be matched by a purity of acquisition in collectors. They should care what the work meant! It made him angry, even disgusted, that people would buy work as an investment once it was validated by certain critics. Though he was never remotely as bad as Hujar on this score, his attitude led him into a certain amount of self-sabotage.
He could not walk easily into his success. He had begun to get very prickly.
In autumn 1983, a second wave of galleries opened, including P.P.O.W and Pat Hearn. The scene wasn’t percolating up from the streets anymore. The new galleries were run by people who’d always wanted to be dealers, and many came armed with backers or business plans. Hearn even remodeled her space. I remember passing it one midnight with friends right before it opened and stopping, astonished at the gleaming new facade that looked so out of place on Avenue B.
Halloween saw the opening of 8BC, soon to be a centerpiece of the East Village club scene, but then just an unheated basement space in a hundred-year-old Loisaidan farmhouse. The owners had removed most of the first floor, leaving the back end of it to serve as a stage. Spectators stood in the basement, heads craned back for a view, taking care to avoid the trickle of an ancient creek bisecting the dirt floor. Named for its location on Eighth Street between Avenues B and C, the club was in one of the few occupied buildings on the block.
In October the East Village Eye did a cover story on the nascent scene, featuring twenty short pieces on artists who were now “hot commodities.” One was David. Writer Sylvia Falcon mentioned both Sounds in the Distance and an art “attuned to the bitter details of life.” She’d first encountered his work in the SoHo News—that centerfold “in which he compared himself to Arthur Rimbaud.” Now he was embarrassed by that claim, he told Falcon. “He does not share Rimbaud’s boyish enthusiasm for evil.”
For his November show at Hal Bromm—a Tribeca space that would soon open an East Village branch—David made more totems and hauled a pile of sand into the gallery so he could place the things on a facsimile of a beach. Among his new paintings was Smuggler, a sailor painted over a photo of a riverboat. This was the image chosen for the poster, and there David added a block of text. He had abandoned his writing at this point, but I recognize some of the lines from his journals. The images don’t exactly cohere, but they’re vivid, like “the drag queen in the dive waterfront coffee shop turning towards a stranger and giving a coy seductive smile which reveals a mouth of rotted teeth.”
When Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo invited Gary Indiana to introduce two new writers in its reading series, he selected David and Joe Vojtko. At the beginning of November, the three of them flew to Buffalo. In an article commemorating his friendship with David, Vojtko recalled that the three of them met at the Kiev for breakfast before heading to the airport and there they began discussing “the purple death, the plague,” the disease they still knew so little about. David informed them that the first sign of AIDS was “white stuff on your tongue.”
The three got to know each other that weekend in Buffalo. Vojtko wrote, “David and Gary were exchanging ideas and biographical information a mile a moment. I knew Gary well enough to know Gary was totally smitten.” It would get complicated later, but back in New York, David and Gary remained the closest of friends, in Vojtko’s estimation, for “many weeks, if not months.”
Chuck Nanney had known both David and Keith Haring since the three of them were busboys together at Danceteria. Nanney recalled that David loved Haring’s subway drawings—to the point of obsession. But Haring had brushed aside any overtures of friendship from David. “In fact,” Nanney said, “I think he was kind of rude, because at some point David became really angry about Keith Haring.”
During the interview taped by Keith Davis, David complained that Haring had “stolen” his image of a naked man with a dog’s head. It was in the piece David contributed to “The Erotic Show” at Club 57 in 1981 which Haring curated. “I didn’t feel comfortable using the man-with-dog’s-head image anymore after his became well known,” David said.
But as Nanney explained it, David’s antagonism had nothing to do with art. “I think David wanted a kind of acceptance from Keith that he never got, and that turned into bitterness.” Feeling excluded could make David apoplectic. Nanney recalled a day that he’d gone out to look for old comic books with French artist Hervé Di Rosa—a straight guy both he and David had a crush on. When Nanney showed David the comics he’d found, David went off on a tirade: How could Nanney not invite him? How could he show him this stuff after excluding him? When Nanney tried to tell him that the jaunt had been spontaneous, not intended to exclude anyone, David went on ranting: “This happens to me all the time!”
“I think it was part of his frustration, his wanting to feel connected to the scene that was still evolving around Keith Haring and feeling ostracized and not welcomed into that,” Nanney said. “It was kind of around that time that he became really anti-Keith and started going around town drawing radiant babies.” That was Haring’s trademark image.
Nanney, who worked at the Mudd Club with Haring after the Danceteria bust, said Haring was angry when someone else began drawing the babies. “Everybody was talking about it, and Keith was like, ‘I didn’t tag here—who’s doing this?’ “
David thought that was hilarious. “He had a strong mischievous side that sometimes was impish and delightful,” said Nanney, “and sometimes just—inexplicable.”
Nanney and his boyfriend, Nicolas Moufarrege, spent time hanging out with David and Hujar—at the Bar or going for walks in the neighborhood. “David had this favorite game he always wanted to play, because he always knew Peter’s result,” Nanney said. He would ask, If you could have one piece of art from any artist from any time, what would it be? Nanney and Moufarrege would choose something different every time. But Hujar always said the same thing: either one of Keith Haring’s subway drawings or an Andy Warhol film, preferably Chelsea Girls.
“David would always wait for Peter’s answer, and he’d be like, ‘Can you believe that?’ He’d go into this whole routine: ‘He doesn’t even want a piece of mine. He wants a Keith Haring drawing.’ He would do this every time so he could go into this mini-rant.”
Hujar would just laugh.
In December 1983, Kiki Smith had her first show, in the exhibition space at the Kitchen, an arts organization known for supporting experimental work in many disciplines. She had decided on a multimedia installation about domestic violence, “Life Wants to Live.” David helped. “We got pig’s blood from the butcher on Seventh Street and covered ourselves with blood and then we made prints of our bodies,” she said. While covered with blood, they passed a camera back and forth, taking close-ups of their bodies, then did the same with a Super 8 camera. Kiki also wanted to do CAT scans of their bodies, but when they went to a man with medical-imaging equipment, he said, why don’t you do X-rays? So they did X-rays of themselves pretending to beat each other up. She added a stethoscopic recording of a heartbeat.
The X-ray technician didn’t have them wear lead shields at any point, then said something about how they should have covered their genitals “if you’re reproducing.” Kiki told him they weren’t reproducing. “I remember David was very angry at me for a very long time,” she said. When they discussed it later, he said something like, how come you don’t want to have children with me? This had nothing to do with sex; they weren’t lovers. This had nothing to do with children; he didn’t want children (though he said that if he did, he’d want to have them with Kiki). This had everything to do with his readiness to feel dismissed and rejected.
The Europeans weren’t afraid, Alan Barrows remembered. They’d walk into the neighborhood, while the New York collectors kept their limos parked right outside the galleries. Europeans were among the first buyers at places like Civilian, scooping up work before the art establishment even took the scene seriously. German television had already sent a camera crew in 1983.
Near the end of that year, David left for Europe with Dean Savard and Alan Barrows. A dealer in Amsterdam wanted to meet with them. Then they took the train to Cologne, where the Anna Friebe Gallery was putting together a February ’84 group show of East Village artists. Friebe’s son drove them to Bonn, where they’d been invited to meet with a curator at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum. David and Barrows went on to Berlin for New Year’s. Savard, smitten with Friebe’s son, returned with him to Cologne.
A German journalist had given David a phone number for filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim in Berlin. Barrows had never heard of him, while David still had enough of a crush on Rosa to feel tongue-tied. (During their chance encounter at the GAA firehouse in 1972, they had not spoken.) Rosa didn’t know who they were but helped them anyway. He arranged for a friend to give them her apartment while she moved in with Rosa for two weeks. Years later, Barrows recalled it as a wonderful trip. “David had to go everywhere,” Barrows said. “In Amsterdam he took me to a male brothel. For rent boys. He wanted to see what it was like. He wanted to see the kids that were there.” They didn’t hire any of them. David just wanted to see it. Then, in Berlin, David wanted to see a female brothel. “That was creepy,” said Barrows. “It was in a bad area, and these women were just ugly. But he wanted to see it.” They went to the parts of East Berlin that were still bombed-out. They walked around both Amsterdam and Berlin looking at graffiti. David photographed everywhere they went—the landscape but also Barrows. He painted on Barrows’s shirt, painted on Barrows’s sneakers. He painted on the souvenir maps.
One day in an Amsterdam bar, David sat doodling on cocktail napkins with a Magic Marker as he griped to Barrows on a familiar topic: all the attention that Keith Haring was getting. And his stuff was so easy! To demonstrate, David drew the radiant baby on one of the cocktail napkins. Apparently he did a convincing job. The bartender looked over and gasped, “It’s you!” He began running over with free drinks for David and Barrows. Then he took the cocktail napkin and put it up behind the bar. David didn’t say anything.
David arrived in Paris on January 9, 1984. He stayed with Jean Pierre till February 22, but JP was at work during the day. And David didn’t know where his remarried sister was till she wrote in March to give him her new address and last name.
Then Gary Indiana showed up. He told David he’d written an article he didn’t even want to write just to get money to come see him. “It wasn’t true,” Gary said later. “I just told him that. I had a big crush on him, and I thought, ‘Oh, we’ll have an affair in Paris.’ But then the very first day, he made it clear that that wasn’t what he was interested in. I didn’t want to spend all my time with him because I still had this crush, but he wanted to spend all his time with me because he didn’t know anybody else. It was really stupid.”
They began working on a script for a Super 8 film to be called Taste of the Black Earth. Like all of David’s subsequent scripts, it’s a list of images: a Tuileries statue appearing on a Metro track, a Pont Neuf guide boat at night, a face covered in bandages that slowly unravel. Though the project was never finished, they shot some footage, which David eventually gave to Gary, who threw it away. He couldn’t recall their overarching idea but remembered that David found an odd abandoned winery in a remote neighborhood and wanted to paint on the walls there, then film some scenario. Judging from David’s contact sheets, they also visited demolition sites, rail yards, meat markets, and stores selling odd curios.
In David’s version of what happened in Paris, which he published in the East Village Eye nearly two years later, he doesn’t mention the film but says that after several days, Gary became hysterical and threatened to kill himself if David didn’t return his feelings.
Gary tells it differently, but on January 25, he did send David a letter of apology. “I’ve treated you very shabbily,” he wrote. “Almost everything I said to you yesterday was horrible and manipulative and cruel. If you can forgive me it would make a great deal of difference to me.”
Asked what he was apologizing for, Gary said, “Probably something utterly trivial.” He did not want to see a copy of the letter to refresh a painful recollection.
“Our relationship in Paris was really depressing,” he said. “[David] would call in the morning and ask me to meet him for breakfast. We always went to the Café de Flore, and then as the day went on, he would become more and more silent and would yawn. And it was almost like I could feel that he hated being around me, and I couldn’t really understand why we were spending all day and into the evening together. The best I could figure out is that I spoke French better than he did, and he just needed somebody to negotiate little practical realities for him.” Eventually, Gary left for the Berlin Film Festival.
David went back to his journal writing during this trip, though he stopped again as soon as he returned to New York. He made sketches and recorded dreams, writing nothing about Gary except for one possible enigmatic appearance in a dream. Somebody calls, sounding upset, and tells David, “You have just one minute.” David thinks it’s Gary and demands, “Gary? Answer me!” But there’s no answer.
The images that stand out in the rest of the dreams have to do with hiding and with shame: In one, he’s just walked on the moon, giddy with joy, and is told he can go back. But he worries, “Will they allow me on the moon if they realize who I am completely?”