The chest X-ray revealed a lesion. So, on New Year’s Eve, Hujar had a bronchoscopy with biopsy to determine why he couldn’t get a full breath, why he always felt so exhausted.
Of course, he had no health insurance. Someone he knew arranged for him to see an eminent lung specialist, who did not charge him, and David paid for the lab work. When the doctor called Hujar right after New Year’s to say “Come to the office,” Hujar refused. He demanded that the results be read to him over the phone. And so he learned that he had PCP, or Pneumocystis, therefore AIDS. He called Stephen Koch, who remembered, “He was overwhelmed and in despair and howling, in terrible shape.”
And he called David. “I remember picking up a television, and I was going to throw it through a window,” David told me. “Then I stopped myself.” He walked the two blocks to Hujar’s loft, in shock, not knowing what to say. It was odd—and he would come to feel this about his own diagnosis too—how the buildings didn’t collapse and the traffic kept moving and you still had to make yourself breakfast.
“You can’t shut out the sights and sounds of death,” David wrote of this moment later in Close to the Knives, “the people waking up with the diseases of small birds or mammals; the people whose faces are entirely black with cancer eating health salads in the lonely seats of restaurants. Those images hurl themselves from the corners of a fast-paced city and you can’t even imagine death properly enough to tell this guy you understand what he’s railing against. I mean, hell, on the first day that he found out he had this certain virus he bent down to pick up a letter addressed to him that had fallen from the mailbox and he turned and said, ‘Even something so simple as getting a letter in the mail has an entirely different meaning.’ ”
Fran Lebowitz and Lynn Davis took Hujar to Columbia Presbyterian on January 13. According to Lebowitz, a “saintly doctor” got him admitted to a private room in the posh Harkness Pavilion. He was being treated like a rich person, which cheered him up. He asked Lebowitz to buy him some pajamas, since he did not own any. “Pale green with dark gray piping,” he specified. She spent a full day hunting for such an item. On January 15, Vince Aletti found him resplendent in blue pajamas with white piping, purchased at Paul Stuart. “She could have gone to Mays,” Hujar told Aletti, naming the proto-Kmart on Union Square.
On the uptown subway Aletti had run into David, who was carrying art supplies to further alter a small painting on the wall of Hujar’s hospital room. To this picture of some Rockefeller Center buildings with the Atlas sculpture out front, David had already added “a mangy bug-eyed dog and a folksy character with a pig on the sidewalk,” Aletti wrote in his journal. That day David added a monkey face in the treetops—because this amused Hujar. Hospital staff did not seem to notice. On the way back downtown, Aletti asked David if he was more afraid of getting AIDS now that an ex-lover had it. “He said he was more worried about the contacts before Peter,” Aletti wrote.
With the PCP responding to treatment, Hujar was discharged after ten days. According to Koch, David had been a constant visitor, “practically sleeping on the floor.”
He took the letter confirming Hujar’s diagnosis and stenciled on it a smaller version of the two men kissing from Fuck You Faggot Fucker.
David’s “Mexican Diaries” opened at Ground Zero a few days before Hujar went into the hospital. Tom Rauffenbart remembered that David had worked quickly, wanting to help James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook make some money. But they didn’t know who David’s collectors were, so they didn’t invite them, and they bought no ads. Nothing sold.
David had created five new paintings with images from Mexico. Two of them pick up on a theme in the “history paintings”—the destruction of indigenous culture. Portrait of Bishop Landa was typically allegorical. Landa was the fanatical Spaniard who imposed Catholicism on the Mayan people, tortured those who did not accept Christ, and burned as many Mayan codices and images as he could find. David painted a street performer breathing fire at the center of this piece, a Mayan priest cutting the heart from a human sacrifice on the left, and, on the right, a papier-mâché head of Christ resting on a cluster of live firecrackers. He connected both religions with violence. David later told Romberger that he had destroyed this painting, an act of poetic inevitability given the subject matter. The burning papier-mâché Christ head appears in the film he would soon begin editing, A Fire in My Belly.
Mexican Crucifix also contrasts two spiritual systems. Christ on the cross appears on the right (paired with an eyeball that is also a globe, a planet Earth with veins) while the Aztec goddess Coatlicue is on the left (paired with a brain). Coatlicue was the earth goddess who gave birth to the moon, the stars, and many a god (like Quetzalcoatl). She was also a destroyer, in her skirt of writhing snakes and necklace of human hearts and hands. Between Coatlicue and Christ, David painted, among other things, the steam locomotive that meant, in his iconography, the arrival of the future, of civilization, of death.
The other few paintings were more personal than anything he’d done since starting the history work. Tommy’s Illness is a surreal scrapbook of their shared travel—Turner, in the center, is surrounded by the imagery he hallucinated while ill with dysentery along with small Mexican versions of various Hollywood monsters. Spanish headlines and newspaper cartoons are barely visible behind it all. For the Ground Zero show, David suspended a marionette in front of this painting, a cartoonish souvenir bandito holding pistols. A similar puppet appears several times, dancing and finally burning up in A Fire in My Belly.
Street Kid was based on an encounter David had in Mexico City. A boy threatened him with a knife, then ran off. David noticed that the boy’s other hand was bloody, bandaged, and holding a few coins. David could identify. This painting is the first in which he directly connects the sensations of doom and crisis he himself felt as a street kid with his sense of a corrupted wider world headed for ruin. He collaged Mexican “Wanted” posters, lists of lottery winners, lotería cards (La Corona, La Bota, La Sirena), wrestling posters, and headlines like “Sacriligio!” around a large, bandaged bloody hand on the right and the figure of a knife-wielding boy on the left. Images of a bandaged hand dropping coins or catching coins appear throughout A Fire in My Belly.
David’s small painting of a monkey walking along dressed in a red suit comes directly from the circus he filmed in Mexico City. This monkey also appears in A Fire in My Belly—somersaulting, riding a goat, always on a leash. David said that he painted the monkey because it looked so lonely. Hujar loved this painting, and David gave it to him. He kept it next to his bed.
New York City hospitals and Gay Men’s Health Crisis had begun advocating with Mayor Ed Koch in 1985 to do something about the growing population of People with AIDS who could no longer work and needed public assistance. PWAs were being turned away at welfare centers, where some workers would not even touch the forms they filled out. The few who managed to get into the system often died before they received any benefits.
Anita Vitale became the first director of the city’s new AIDS Case Management Unit in January 1986, the month David and Tom became a couple. Fear of the illness was so intense at that point that when its offices opened at the welfare center on Fourteenth Street, the AIDS CMU had to maintain not just a separate entrance and separate bathrooms but also separate air-conditioning. Walls were extended to the ceiling to ensure that no one would breathe the same air.
Anita was Tom Rauffenbart’s best friend. They had worked together in the city’s child welfare department for many years. Tom called her early in ’87 to say that David had a dear friend sick with AIDS. Could she help him? When Anita went to meet Hujar at his loft on February 14, she’d already put the paperwork through to get him Medicaid, food stamps, and a rental allowance. She came by to see what else he needed, and they ended up talking for hours. Hujar showed her his photos. She remembered his burning eyes and how weak he was already. And how stubborn. He’d been seeing Dr. Emanuel Revici, who treated AIDS patients with fatty acids, sometimes combined with elements like potassium or selenium. Revici (who died in 1998 at the age of 101) had developed this approach while treating cancer patients. He’s still celebrated in the world of alternative medicine, the subject of a hagiography called The Doctor Who Cures Cancer. But Revici also gets a chapter in a book called Doctors from Hell and the Quackwatch website debunks his approach in no uncertain terms, noting that “state licensing authorities placed Revici on probation in 1988 and revoked his license in 1993 after concluding that he had violated the terms of his probation.”
Anita had decided to become Hujar’s caseworker. Even while managing the whole program, she had clients. There was such a backlog of people who needed help. Occasionally she accompanied him to Revici’s office. Azidothymidine (AZT) the first drug developed to treat AIDS, had just become available, but many regarded it as toxic, and it had terrible side effects. Hujar refused to take it. “He didn’t want any orthodox treatment,” Anita said. Certainly there was one thing he could get from Revici that he could not get from a conventional doctor, and that was hope.
David set up a meeting of Hujar’s friends who wanted facts about AIDS, still such a new horror. This meeting, at Aletti’s apartment, included Fran Lebowitz, Gary Schneider, John Erdman, Stephen Koch, and probably others. Anita came to speak and brought a colleague, Peter Ungvarski, then in charge of the AIDS Home Care Program at Visiting Nurse Services. They talked about what to expect—for example, the kinds of opportunistic infections they might see in someone with a severely impaired immune system. The PCP Hujar suffered from, Anita told them, was “the least of the worst” because at least there was a treatment for it. She had provided Hujar with a home attendant, but that hadn’t lasted too long. Like many others, he didn’t enjoy having a “stranger” in his apartment.
Erdman said that after this meeting “David took the lead and set up a loose immediate schedule of caregiving, but that was temporary. Peter always had someone coming in to cook, though mostly not us from that meeting. Peter was very popular and the line was long to feed him. David seemed to orchestrate everything, except food.”
Several times a week, though, David took Hujar to breakfast at a nearby Second Avenue coffee shop. Occasionally Anita joined them. “I think David saw him every day,” Anita said. “Sometimes twice.”
Writer and firebrand Larry Kramer came to speak at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center on March 10 and drew a large crowd.
First he asked two thirds of that audience to stand and told them they would be dead within five years. He reminded them of the article he’d published exactly four years earlier, “1,112 and Counting.” Now the number was 32,000. And counting.
In an echo of that essay, he declared, “If my speech tonight doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If what you’re hearing doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men will have no future here on Earth. How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?” He talked about a government that was murderously indifferent and a Food and Drug Administration that moved at a glacial pace to approve anything.
“I think we must want to die,” Kramer harangued the crowd. “I have never been able to understand why for six long years we have sat back and let ourselves literally be knocked off man by man—without fighting back. I have heard of denial, but this is more than denial; this is a death wish.”
According to eyewitness Maer Roshan, Kramer ended the speech by asking, “What are we going to do?” “Suddenly,” Roshan said, “a slight woman in the back stood up and shrieked, ‘Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!’ ”
Two days later, some three hundred people met back at the center to form the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, ACT UP.
On March 24, hundreds of new activists charged onto Wall Street at seven A.M. after hanging an effigy of the FDA commissioner in front of Trinity Church. They tied up traffic and handed out copies of Larry Kramer’s speech along with a fact sheet labeled “Why We Are Angry,” focused on the official indifference toward finding a treatment for this illness or educating people about it. Seventeen people were arrested in front of the FDA’s Wall Street office.
David dreamt that he was helping to sell Hujar’s photos. This was his sole journal entry for ’87 before November.
For some reason, he tries to get a literary bookstore like the Gotham to sell the pictures. A man there tells him they don’t have room; it’s a small shop. “I seize a person nearby. ‘Can I talk to you privately? … Peter has AIDS and needs the money, and he has a few beautiful portfolios completed.’ ” The man he’s grabbed says, “Maybe.” The photos are in color and have religious content—Buddhists in India, and a church where Hujar had had a “strong experience.” Then David sees that the pictures are already in the back of the store, stacked in a pile.
Hujar recorded the dates and subjects of his photographs in a cheap eight-by-five-inch spiral notebook. He made one entry after his diagnosis: John Heys on March 2, 1987. Heys was an old friend and a performer probably best known for his portrayal of Diana Vreeland. Hujar had photographed him many times. According to Stephen Koch, “John Heys desperately needed a photograph done while Peter was sick, and Peter agreed to do it, and that is the last picture he ever took.”
Gary Schneider processed the film, one roll, and either Schneider-Erdman or another commercial lab printed the photo.
Tom knew that Hujar was David’s best friend, but said that at the time of the diagnosis, he did not understand “the depth of that relationship.”
Tom had never even seen them together, although he’d been involved with David for a year at that point. After Hujar got sick, though, the three of them met a few times for dinner. Tom cooked over at Hujar’s loft. “It became clear that these guys were cemented somewhere,” said Tom. “They were like extensions of each other. They were so similar. Each had a kind of presence, a depth. It radiated from them.”
Typically, David never wrote or spoke much about him while Hujar was alive.
But David had a dream he labeled “recurring,” and Hujar was there in two of the three accounts of it he wrote down. It seems to speak to their connection. This was a dream about ancient lakes with caves beneath their surface. In the dream, David was always traveling toward them, and they were always in a different location.
In the first written account, David began in a churchyard where a fat priest guarded a pile of gold bars. He could feel that he was in an Aztec or a Mayan city, walking with Hujar. “I suddenly realized where I was. I had a faint recollection of the lakes.” Rounding a curve, he encountered a woman selling ancient Mayan carvings and fossils and tree branches covered with turquoise paint. “Beyond her were the lakes, but she now owned the land and didn’t want anyone walking around.” David was upset. “All I wanted was to find the lakes and show Peter.”
The second account was a dream within a dream. That is, David woke (in the dream, not in reality) and Hujar was there, turning to him in the shadows and saying, “Where did you see them? Think about it, and I’ll get us there.” David knew that Hujar was referring to the deeper dream he’d just woken from, a dream about the lakes.
“I look at Peter strangely with a slight smile,” David wrote, “as if I know he’ll bring us there because he can see into my images, something like psychic dialogue. He walks down this path with me.… There’s one doorway with two Indian chiefs standing on each side of it.… I walk through with him and both of us burst out laughing. I feel so happy that we can transfer thoughts without talking.” They were in a semi-forest. “A feeling of centuries behind the scene. Something from the Aztecs. Something from Indians. A place of refuge.”
The image of the distant lake, the one he could never reach, figures, of course, in one of the last pieces David ever made, described many chapters ago, but it bears repeating. Over a photo of skeletons exposed in an Indian burial ground, he silk-screened 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 …”
When Hujar left Columbia Presbyterian, he thought there must have been a mistake in his diagnosis.
“Peter thought AIDS didn’t exist,” John Erdman said. “And if it did exist, it wasn’t what they said it was. He thought it was some anti-gay media invention, even while people were getting sick around him. So when he got diagnosed, he thought, ‘Well, this probably isn’t a fatal disease,’ because he didn’t believe the publicity.”
Vince Aletti remembered that period after the first hospitalization as one of the best he ever had with Hujar. “For the first time in years, we hugged, held hands, cried together, sat and talked about how much we cared about each other,” Aletti wrote in Hujar’s obituary. “We said things we’d always taken for granted or were just too cool to put into words. Peter was radiant with emotion, our visits so passionate they were almost sexy. In the first months, meeting was an event, and Peter had events every day. All the friends he’d kept at arm’s length came around, grateful for a chance to be unashamedly loving, to cook a meal, to shop and clean and listen. And we said to each other, that now, finally, Peter knows how much people care about him. Peter accepts.”
On April 6, Aletti met Hujar for dinner at a health food restaurant. Hujar declared that he was now meditating three hours a day, and he got Aletti to sample some wheatgrass. Hujar was in a pleasant mood. As they were leaving the restaurant, he announced, “You know, I have a feeling that in a year, a year and a half, I won’t have AIDS. It won’t be in my body.” He said that he personally knew someone who was beating this illness. Aletti recounted the story in his journal. There’d been an experiment in San Francisco with a hundred AIDS patients. Half were told they had a fatal disease; the other half were told they had an unknown disease. Then all were given an antiviral diet. Of the fifty told that they had an unknown disease, fifteen were still alive. Of the fifty told that they would die, all but one had died. That one was the man Hujar knew, still alive because he refused to accept that the illness was fatal. He had kept himself alive with his mind. “Peter says that if you really want something, it will come to you,” Aletti wrote.
By late spring or early summer, however, Hujar’s attempts at optimism had passed. “When he remained still sick, still plagued by money problems, not knowing where this was going, and not knowing how to get better,” Aletti told me, “then started this whole odyssey of trying to find a cure for himself. All these nutty crackpot cures.” Someone even had him drinking his own urine, mixed with supplements. David reported this to Anita.
“He ended up getting very angry in general at what was going on with him,” said Aletti, “and then just more generally angry at everyone.”
In April, David and Tom made their third trip to St. John’s. This time they decided that, instead of just passing through the San Juan airport, they would stop and spend a few days in Puerto Rico.
David wanted to film a cockfight. They found a place in San Juan that Tom described as “upscale” and “classy,” the top of the line for this activity. But they had a few days before fights were scheduled, so they drove off to explore the island. They found a special beach. They visited Loíza, a town originally settled by Africans, where they tracked down a local artist whose posters they’d seen in a store. They both bought work from him.
On their way back to San Juan from the west coast of Puerto Rico, they ran into a heavy storm and flooded roads. At one point, they got stuck in a puddle and had to hire some kids to push them out. Tom found an alternate route through the mountains, so they avoided further floods, but they got back to San Juan too late for the cockfight. “David was miserable,” Tom said. “I mean, fucking miserable as only David could be. Inconsolable.” Then as they drove through town, Tom happened to spot a large drawing of a cockfight on a building. “As luck would have it, they were just starting their day’s fights,” he said. “Thank god.”
This was a neighborhood place, shabbier and thus more interesting to film. The proprietor not only gave David permission to shoot the fight but also let him go back to where the handlers were prepping the birds, attaching razor-sharp spurs to their legs. David included this footage in A Fire in My Belly. The cockfight must have seemed essential to him because it gave him an animal-versus-animal fight. He already had animal versus human (a bullfight filmed off a television) and human versus human (Mexican wrestling).
“We almost broke up twice during that trip,” Tom said.
As they moved from the romance phase into building a relationship, they fought and argued a lot. And what were the fights about? “I don’t think they were about anything,” said Tom. “What would happen is, somebody would say something to set the other one off. Then the other one would go into a mood. Then the one who’d set it off would try to cajole the other one out of the mood, and it wouldn’t work. It would get ugly, and the intensity of these fights was just very, very strong.”
If the fights were about something specific, they could handle it. They could work it out. But most of them were about “crazy stuff,” Tom said, “and a great many were my fault. That’s one of the reasons I went into therapy. I could kill a relationship within six months with my moods. Awful. I certainly got a lot better as time went on, and I was going through therapy, and I stopped drinking the way I’d been drinking. I really worked at it.”
In May, Tom went to New Orleans with his stepsister. He and David had not settled whatever they were arguing about at that point. “So when I came back, he was waiting for me, and he was already in a mood,” Tom said. Soon after, Steve Brown showed up and helped David move all his belongings out of Tom’s apartment. With no explanation. “That was a dramatic move-out,” said Tom. “It was rather unpleasant. I thought we were breaking up.
“This was the first relationship I think either of us had where we were working through things that had probably been haunting us all of our lives. We were both quick to lose our tempers, and once you’re there, you’re just not listening. And we went through lots and lots of those moments. I think neither one of us actually knew how to have a relationship.
“I don’t know how the hell we kept pulling it back together. There was a lot of agita. But we stuck it out. Sometimes I’m amazed that we did.”
Tom was clear about his feelings for David. “He was the love of my life. I’ve never met anybody who I was so emotionally changed and moved by.” But David would never say how he felt about Tom. “We struggled in those first couple years,” said Tom, “over ‘who am I to you?’ “ One night during this time of Hujar’s illness, Tom and David had dinner at a restaurant across the street from Hujar’s loft, and it came up again. “What is this relationship about? Where do I belong in all this?”
David told Tom that he had three priorities: “My work, Peter, and you. In that order.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I have to decide whether I can live with this,’ “ Tom said. He never felt resentful of Hujar or the time David spent with him. He also knew that David’s work came first, that he couldn’t survive unless he made things. “I decided I could live with it.”
David was at work on what he sometimes called his “Mexican film.” He had images to shoot in New York, like coins dropping from a bandaged hand and sides of beef moving through the meat market. Then he began editing.
James Romberger was probably one of the first to see A Fire in My Belly early in 1988. “[David] had me sit in front of his big TV, next to his baby elephant skeleton, and insisted that I watch his Mexican film. What followed was an assault on my senses, a view of a world completely out of control. The strobed, often violent scenes of wrestlers, cock and bull fights, lurid icons, impoverished dwellings, clanking engines, an enslaved monkey, cripples begging for coins, for bread, a burning, spinning globe—it was a picture of indifference to the value of life, Mexico as a grinding machine of poverty and cruel spectacle. I didn’t enjoy the experience.”
David explained what this work meant to him in a 1988 letter to Barry Blinderman, the curator who was putting together David’s retrospective:
The film deals with ancient myth and its modern counterpart. It explores structures of power and control—using at times the fire ants north of Mexico City as a metaphor for social structure.… I explore spectacle in the form of the wrestling matches that occur in small arenas in the poor neighborhoods where myth is an accepted part of the sport; the guys with fantastic masks are considered the “good guys” whereas those without masks are personifications of evil. These images are interspersed with cockfights and TV bullfights. There are sections pertaining to power and control; images of street beggars and little children blowing ten foot long flames among cars at an intersection. Images of armored trucks picking up bank receipts. Images of loaves of bread being sewn up as well as a human mouth—control and silencing through economics. There are invasive aspects of Christianity played against images of Day of the Dead and the earthquake buildings and mummies of northern Mexico. There are symbols of rage and the need for release.
David spent one day working with Doug Bressler, from 3 Teens, on a soundtrack for the film. They combined atmospherics, Bressler’s guitar, and sounds David recorded in Mexico (street noise, Spanish talk from the radio, a televised soccer game, a mariachi band, and so on). About halfway through the score, he begins to whisper something inaudible over a small drum and a gradual crescendo of guitar until words do begin to come through: “Go inside your own head, and you can do all these things—easy as drawing blood out through a needle.” The score has everything from machinelike riffs to burbling water to what seems like a funeral march, some of it haunting, much of it arresting, but there’s no overarching theme. Bressler couldn’t recall whether he’d even seen the footage before they started working, and David didn’t talk about what the film meant to him. A cassette labeled “Mexico soundtrack” was found in David’s archive at NYU’s Fales Library. He had never synced it up with the footage. “It may not have met his quality standards or been what he intended,” said Bressler. “That’s how he was. Often you weren’t completely in on the whole picture.”
David created at least two scripts for A Fire in My Belly. Really they were just lists of images. He had begun to make these “lists of associations” for almost every project, whether a film or a piece of visual art. Most of the time, one image was not enough for him, though there are notable exceptions. But usually his work was collaged and layered, and if he used photos, it would be multiple photos arranged to resonate off one another. He wanted to surround a subject. He wanted to peel back layers.
But he never found a way to do that with film, an inherently linear medium. His films are the weakest part of his oeuvre.
Even when it’s nonnarrative, even when it’s a collection of images, the filmmaker has to create a flow and establish some thread that pulls you through. David certainly knew how to make a potent image—a spinning eyeball, a kid breathing fire, coins dropping into a bowl of blood, ants on a crucifix. But if the meaning of each image isn’t instantly clear, and those images simply follow one another at brutal speed with much repetition, the work just doesn’t cohere.
With A Fire in My Belly, he intended to address this problem. As he explained to Blinderman, “What I explored in the film is the workings within surface image; so I split open continuous images and placed studio shots or other related images within the splice—the film uses spliced-in images almost as subliminal messages but each image is used at least long enough to register on the brain; sometimes longer.” He intended to create the cinematic equivalent of layering or collage, but it doesn’t work. David may have realized this. That would explain, at least, why he never regarded any of these “image” films as finished.
In the catalog for his 1990 retrospective, David lists A Fire in My Belly this way: “went through two versions then disassembled for other projects.” What remains in his archive is a thirteen-minute silent “film in progress” with title and end credits. It’s divided into eight parts, each introduced by the image of a steam locomotive. In his final script, some of these sections have labels: aggression, hunger, religion, celebratory death, prostitution. He’s also trying to work the four elements into this plan. The death section is labeled “wind,” for example. Not that he actually followed his script, but it shows how ambitious this project was. He was trying to pack the universe into it. Most of what Romberger describes above is still there, and then some. Like screaming tabloid headlines, Aztec pyramids, a dancing bandito marionette, and two seconds of fire ants (on dirt). David also left an “excerpt” from A Fire in My Belly, seven minutes of footage found on another reel. This imagery is even more intense. Here’s all the ant action (apart from the above-mentioned two seconds), as they scurry over coins, bread, a Day of the Dead skull, and a crucifix. That’s intercut with images of mummified corpses, lips being sewn, legless men walking on their stumps, a hustler stripping, a cheetah pacing, a giant roach dying, the bandito marionette burning, and so on.
In Mexico, he found a bit less of the “pre-invented world,” an unvarnished Catholicism, an acknowledgment of mortality (in Day of the Dead), and actual picturesque ruins. He loved the images he collected there but he needed time to understand their resonance.
With A Fire in My Belly, David had begun to work out core ideas that came to fruition later. Many of the Mexican images ended up in work he created for his 1989 show, “In the Shadow of Forward Motion.” The Fire in My Belly script represents, for example, his preliminary thinking for the “Ant Series.” Religion and aggression and prostitution in the script become spirituality, violence, and desire in the ant photos. Also, in the hunger section of the script, he wrote the words “silence through economics.” That’s the title of a multiple photographic piece he completed for the ’89 show. Images from A Fire in My Belly also ended up in Spirituality (for Paul Thek) and The Weight of the Earth (Parts 1 and 2) and in slides for his performance ITSOFOMO. The red-coated monkey appears again (painted) in Seeds of Industry, along with some of the photos. He also printed some of the film stills. Then, he gave the seven-minute excerpt to Rosa von Praunheim, who incorporated a great deal of this disturbing footage into his 1990 film about AIDS, Silence = Death.
Tom Rauffenbart, Anita Vitale, and Peter Hujar at Coney Island on the day they also went to Queens, with David, to find Hujar a “cure” for AIDS. (Courtesy of Anita Vitale)
Early in May, Hujar told Aletti that he was feeling a loneliness and a need for people. Friends were coming to see him every day. But then they would leave, and he would feel so alone. Aletti told Hujar it sounded like the same depression he’d fallen into periodically over the past ten years. Hujar seemed to agree. It worried him. He was trying to survive by thinking positively, and this depression could affect his ability to get better.
David and Tom were now sharing an old Toyota once owned by Tom’s mother, though David still had the hardy Malibu. On a weekend in late spring, they drove with Hujar and Anita to Coney Island, where they walked the boardwalk, visited Sideshows by the Seashore, and had lunch in nearby Sheepshead Bay.
Then Hujar told them he’d read a story in one of the tabloids about a healer in Queens. She could perform miracles, he said. He had to find her. She was in Flushing Meadows Park every weekend. That’s all he could remember, but he insisted, “We have to go. She can cure me.”
So they drove to Queens as a storm developed. They couldn’t find out anything more about who or where this healer might be in a park whose acreage is significantly larger than Central Park’s. They drifted aimlessly through thunder and lightning. “We all got disgusted,” said Anita.
“We finally just gave up,” said Tom, “and Peter got pissed off. Then David got mad. We’d had a nice time in Coney Island, but this thing, this quest, just set everybody off.”
In June 1987, New York Magazine reproduced the group portrait of the East Village scene’s first dealers taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for his “New Irascibles” series in 1985. Of the thirteen people in that picture, ten were out of business.
Among the galleries that hadn’t closed, half a dozen were about to catapult out of their cramped East Village spaces to the next frontier, Broadway below Houston. And more would follow. Jay Gorney, part of the third or maybe fourth wave of dealers and one of the few still in business in the twenty-first century, told New York writer Amy Virshup, “The galleries that showed ‘East Village art’ closed because they weren’t showing terrific art. They had a media run and now that media run has ended. If you’re doing well here now, it’s time to move on.”
Ground Zero had closed by then, and didn’t move on. Its last location was a basement space, and damp, so James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook had decided to put gray carpet down. “We all got into the same trouble when we formalized our spaces,” Marguerite said. They could no longer allow artists to fling paint around or build campfires on the floor. “I think none of us had much energy, given what was going on,” she said. “It didn’t seem important to paint Needlenoses all over the walls when people were dying down the road.”
Romberger began to work with David on a project they’d been discussing for years. David wanted to tell the story of his life. He wanted it to be a comic book, so that young gay people would realize that there was someone else who’d survived the things they were going through. David gave Romberger the monologues about his own childhood that he’d written for Sounds in the Distance. Romberger had it worked out in pencil form by the beginning of 1988, when he and Marguerite went off to spend the next half year or so in Belgium.
On June 5, I ran into Keith Davis for the first time in many months. I can be precise about the date because this encounter so disturbed me that I wrote it down in my journal. We stopped to talk on the traffic island at Bowery and Houston. Keith looked uncharacteristically scruffy, in old clothes with a scarf tied over his head pirate-style. On the end of his nose was puffy bluish-purple lesion. I was horribly shocked. My first impulse—not acted on—was to ask what had happened to his nose. As if he’d tell me that he’d fallen off his bike, and it was all going to get better. But I knew the lesion was Kaposi’s sarcoma. I knew instantly that Keith was going to die.
He asked if I was on my way to the Richard Kern films playing on Fourth Street, an odd question since I was headed in the opposite direction. So I told him I was on my way to a Lydia Lunch performance in SoHo, and we stood there chatting about Lunch and Kern—inanely, I thought, given the gravity of what was really going on. He was so weirdly upbeat.
“So how are you?” I finally blurted.
“Oh, I have AIDS.” He pointed to his nose: “This is Kaposi’s.”
I grabbed his hand and arm. “Oh, Keith.”
He shrugged off my reaction, completely cheerful. His doctor had him on a new experimental drug, and he’d gained thirteen pounds. “I’m gonna beat it,” he said.
I learned later that he was seeing Dr. Emanuel Revici.
I learned later that he’d known he was sick since the previous fall, and just hadn’t told anyone.
“When Keith finally told me about his diagnosis,” David said when I interviewed him in 1990, “I remember I was going every day to help Peter, and it was so overwhelming, emotionally and physically, that—I didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t do with Keith what I was doing with Peter, in terms of being that emotional contact. I felt terrible about it, but I knew I would crack.”
Philip Zimmerman became Keith’s principal caregiver. Zimmerman’s relationship with David had been strained ever since the disastrous cross-country trip in ’85, and they hadn’t seen much of each other. He was working as an assistant in Keith’s graphic design business. “As he got sicker, I was there more to help him deal with his illness,” said Zimmerman. “Then David started to come back around.” He and Zimmerman reconnected.
Keith agreed to pose for Rosalind Solomon’s project “Portraits in the Time of AIDS.” “She took this beautiful portrait,” Zimmerman said. “I mean beautiful and horrible. She brought a big one over to the house, and when I came into work that day, the portrait was sitting up on the cabinet, and Keith was just completely devastated because he really hadn’t been able to see clearly or objectively how disfigured he was by the KS. I just really felt from that point on there was a rapid decline. Psychically it did something to him, this portrait. It really disturbed me. He set that up and then he set up a mirror beside it.”
Sometimes children approached him on the street and asked if he was a clown. He would say, “Yes. I am.”
The last time I spoke to Keith, he was about to fly to Oregon for his parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. He said his doctor had told him not to go, but he was determined. Keith was very close to his family. He called his parents every few days. “A fiftieth anniversary only comes once,” he told me, still sounding positive about his own prognosis: “That thing they say, ‘Always fatal.’ That’s just the media. ‘Two years to live.’ That’s the media. Some people have lived for five years.”
Hujar went back into the hospital on July 9 with a recurrence of Pneumocystis, or PCP. According to Stephen Koch, who took him to Cabrini Medical Center, Hujar turned to him as they were leaving the loft and said, “I’ve decided that you should have the pictures. Send little Madeline to college.” Hujar knew that Koch and his wife wanted a child. (And once she arrived, they duly gave their daughter the middle name Madeline.) Koch had talked to Hujar about making a will and found him a lawyer. The will was drafted while Hujar was at Cabrini and signed when he got back home.
Lynn Davis called Aletti to tell him that Hujar had been admitted and that she’d never seen him weaker. “She says he asked that no one come and see him, that no one call,” Aletti wrote in his journal. “He said he didn’t want to answer any questions.” Hujar did want to see David—and Anita, who went to visit him at Cabrini that night. What he apparently wanted from her was help getting out. But she couldn’t get him out. He needed the pentamidine treatments that were usually administered by IV. “Awful stuff,” said Anita. David came and again altered the hospital decor, adding creatures to the pictures on the wall. Based on a receipt for the phone in the room (paid for by David), Hujar came home again on July 17.
“Sometimes they sent them home on oral medications,” Anita said. “But for me, that hospitalization marked a downturn. That marked, for me, his decline, starting that summer. He began to talk about himself in the third person. He would say things like, ‘Pete’s scared.’ ‘Pete’s dying.’ ”
Just days after Hujar left Cabrini, Keith Davis was admitted. Maybe he’d contracted pneumonia in Oregon or on the long flight back, but he was in the hospital within a week of returning to New York, and he deteriorated quickly. He was having trouble breathing. He had a high fever and dizziness, and he was too weak to walk. David came to visit every day, as did Zimmerman. Family members flew to his bedside. A lawyer came in to help him draw up a will. Zimmerman told me, “I still have a piece of paper with his weak and shaky handwriting that says things like ‘give to family,’ ‘give to Philip.’ He was on a ventilator and could not speak.”
The will is dated July 22. The next day, he had two cardiac arrests. He’d left no directive, no “do not resuscitate.” Doctors put him on life support at the direction of his anguished family.
“There were so many days of waiting for him to die the third and final time,” David wrote in Close to the Knives, “and we’d been talking to him daily because they say hearing is the last sense to go. Sometimes alone with him, the nurse outside the room, I’d take his hands and bend over whispering in his ears: hey, I don’t know what you’re seeing but if there’s light move toward it; if there’s warmth move towards it.”
Zimmerman remembered the days dragging by—it seemed like weeks—as it became, he said, “increasingly difficult to maintain the hope for a turnaround.” Doctors told the family that in all likelihood KS had spread throughout his body, including his brain. There were a series of conversations, said Zimmerman, “a series of letting-gos that finally allowed the family to agree to the withdrawal of life support.”
On July 27, a doctor came in and removed Keith from various tubes and pumps. Zimmerman was there, and one of Keith’s sisters, and David. Then, Keith went so quickly. As David described it, “The guy on the bed takes two breaths and arches his back almost imperceptibly, his lips slightly parted. I have hold of one leg and his sister one hand Philip another hand or part of his arm and we’re sobbing and I’m totally amazed at how quietly he dies how beautiful everything is with us holding him down on the bed on the floor fourteen stories above the earth.”
I’ve always been struck by that image. “Holding him down.” As if he might have floated away. Keith was thirty-two years old.
The next day, friends came to an open house at Keith’s loft on Suffolk Street. It was a jolt: here the funky, aggressive East Village art that Keith so loved and championed, there the sweet, bewildered retirement-age farmers who were his parents. This juxtaposition seemed to illustrate the new world of disharmony we were about to inhabit as we lost so many people who were not supposed to be dead.
The day before that open house, Vince Aletti stopped by Hujar’s loft and found him propped up in bed holding two big crystals Fran Lebowitz had given him. He held one over his heart, one over his belly. “He was wondering if maybe he was dying,” Aletti wrote in his journal. “I tell Peter I can’t see that.… I can’t feel it really happening.”
At Keith’s open house, David had told me he was doing something with Hujar related to yoga. He had seemed so positive about Hujar’s prognosis.
“But you had to be,” Gary Schneider told me. “You had to support his alternative processes. He wouldn’t allow anyone else around him.”
Hujar so needed money that his friends were trying to recruit people to buy prints from him but, said Schneider, “if they came to the door and they said one word wrong, Peter would tell them, ‘Fuck you, get out.’ ”
John Erdman recalled that Hujar’s anger got worse and worse as the year went on. “He threw out one of the people cooking for him—banned him from coming back because he used one square too much of paper towel.”
One day Schneider made pasta primavera and was pulling leaves from a bunch of basil while Hujar complained that he wasn’t doing it fast enough, that he shouldn’t pull the leaves off one at a time. “He was screaming at me,” Schneider said. “At a certain point, I gave up cooking for him because it was just too painful.”
Hujar talked to his friends about killing himself. He would throw himself off a building, but he couldn’t decide which one.
“He became a different person,” Erdman said. “Everything just fell apart for him. And it was scary.”
“There were physical outbursts,” said Schneider.
Schneider and Erdman were out with him at a neighborhood restaurant, when Hujar picked up a glass of water and threw it at a waitress, for no reason. She understood what was going on, said Erdman. “It was so on the surface. You could see that he was sick, and you could feel him just radiating rage.”
On August 15, Hujar asked Aletti to go shopping for him. After Aletti went to five different stores to find the best peaches and the right beets, he listened to Hujar complain about other people’s shopping. For example, he had sent Stephen Koch out for white corn, and since Koch couldn’t find any, he brought back yellow. Then Hujar informed Aletti that he’d made a will, and he’d named Koch as executor. Early on, he had asked Fran Lebowitz to be executor. She told him, “Peter you’re not dying.” After that, he went back and forth between Koch and Aletti. At one point, he had told Aletti that he would choose him. “He admits he changed his mind about me because I wasn’t seeing him very much,” Aletti wrote in his journal. Then Hujar told Aletti he would probably change his mind again and launched into “a list of [Koch’s] petty transgressions like the white corn incident.” Aletti told him the decision should not be based on whether he had visited enough or whether Koch had purchased the right corn. Hujar should imagine Aletti as his executor for a few days and see how it felt.
The next night, Aletti came to make or get dinner for Hujar and inadvertently crossed a line when he commented on how quickly a couple of Tylenol had reduced Hujar’s fever.
“It doesn’t change the PCP,” Hujar said.
“Right, you’re just treating symptoms,” Aletti said.
“Let’s not argue,” Hujar said.
“Are we arguing?” Aletti wondered.
Hujar began mimicking Aletti’s remarks about aspirin and told him to just leave.
Aletti said he’d make him dinner and moved to hug him. Hujar was, Aletti said, “batting [him] away, then jumping out of bed teeth bared, enraged, yelling, ‘I don’t care if I felt good in May! I’m dying!’ and looking for things to throw.” Aletti waited for Hujar to settle down, then washed the dishes and asked again what he wanted to eat. Hujar said he’d just eat bananas.
“I told him he didn’t need to be a martyr. I wanted to make sure he had a meal,” Aletti wrote. “He got up slowly and worked himself into a rage again, flailing at his rolodex on top of the TV, white saliva coming out of his mouth, waving his arms and telling me he’s dying and he just wants me to leave and never come back.”
Aletti could not calm him down. Hujar walked Aletti to the door and shut it behind him. Very upset, Aletti called David and a few other friends to discuss what had happened.
David’s show “The Four Elements” opened at Gracie Mansion Gallery on September 17. James Romberger remembered seeing Hujar there, “in a terrible state, just completely fucking vaporizing.” But Hujar wouldn’t have missed this for anything.
Critic Lucy Lippard called Wind (for Peter Hujar) “one of Wojnarowicz’s most transcendent paintings, emotion distilled.”
David explained this painting to me once in his typically oblique way. It was all about portals (an open window) and extinction (a dinosaur) and destruction (a tornado). The open window with curtain blowing, top center, came from a horrifying dream—“a dream of death that shook me”—about a friend in Canada. I now know that he was speaking of the dream he had in Paris about Michael Morais, in which a spirit entered a room where Michael and Brian Butterick were both sleeping, and the “thing” passed over Brian and went straight into Michael. Later David found out that Michael’s wife had given birth to a stillborn child on that day. (Michael would die of AIDS in 1991.)
“The horrifying thing was something I couldn’t even paint,” David told me. “It was a sense of something moving past me very quickly, and whatever it was filled me with a great deal of fear, but it started out with this window with all this light behind it, the wind blowing the curtains into the room. This was in the later part of Peter’s illness.” A red line coming through that window attaches to a newborn baby, based on a photo of his brother Steven’s new baby. Wind, in part, is about rebirth. The other end of that red line is attached to a paratrooper jumping from a plane (above the baby). Right behind the paratrooper is David himself, in probably the only self-portrait he ever painted. (His other self-portraits were photographs.) The lines of circuitry in the painting came from what he described as a “nuclear reactor handbook” he found in Argentina. That was wind at its worst—explosions, the wind that follows. That and the tornado painted at bottom right—wind that destroys. He also painted a wing based on Hujar’s favorite image, the Dürer wing. When David first met him, Hujar had a postcard of the Dürer, along with a mummified seagull wing, hanging over a mirror. Hujar had always wanted that image tattooed on his arm—in sepia, so it would disappear when he got a tan. David would have the wing carved onto Hujar’s tombstone.
With these masterful paintings, David had found a way to explain the world using the iconography he’d developed. For example, Water contains more than two dozen individual paintings, or maybe film stills, that combine biology, his own history, and a great melancholy. Fish, frogs, skulls, explicit sexual images, a small monkey trying to drink from a petri dish, concentric circles around pebbles hitting a pond, a baby sinking below the waves where “Dad’s ship” patrols—all are organized in a grid inside one drop of water. “Dad’s ship” shows up in the background in two of the other small works and also outside the water drop, where a large ship moves through the ocean, its hold peeled back to reveal a fossil. At the top right, a bandaged hand drops a flower from a prison window surrounded by snowflakes. Also appearing in the ocean and around the grid—a great deal of sperm.
The Museum of Modern Art now owns all four of the “Elements” paintings, but in 1987, Gracie Mansion said, “Nobody was interested. I called all these people who had wanted his work, this huge waiting list—and they had moved on to something else. I sold one piece.” That was Wind (for Peter Hujar). The rest of the exhibit, also unsold, included Mexican Crucifix, Tommy’s Illness, and a new painting titled The Anatomy and Architecture of June 19, 1953 (for Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg). It couldn’t have helped that Arts magazine published a piece that very month that lumped David in with artists from the dissolving East Village scene “who seem to have been making better work three years ago.” The article pissed David off. He had very little income in 1987.
But he kept to his habit of leaving town the day after a show opened, flying to New Orleans with Tom for a long weekend.
One day Hujar went by himself to eat at Bruno’s, a coffee shop at Second Avenue and Twelfth. David heard from Hujar how Bruno himself had approached his table and said, “Are you ready to pay?” and then made Hujar put his five-dollar bill into a paper bag. Bruno came back with the change in another paper bag and tossed it on the table, declaring, “You know why.”
“At first I wanted to go into Bruno’s at rush hour and pour ten gallons of cow’s blood onto the grill and simply say, ‘You know why,’ “ David wrote. “But that was something I might have done ten years ago. Instead I went in during a crowded lunch hour and screamed at Bruno demanding an explanation and every time a waitress or Bruno asked me to lower my voice I got louder and angrier until Bruno was cowering in back of the kitchen and every knife and fork in the place stopped moving. But even that wasn’t enough to erase this rage.”
Hujar stopped seeing Dr. Revici in August. He had decided to try AZT. The drug had to be taken every four hours, so Anita had to call him every day at four A.M. Apparently, he had his alarm set for midnight but could not manage resetting it.
One day at breakfast, Hujar told David that he’d seen a news report about a doctor on Long Island who was injecting AIDS patients with typhoid vaccine. The idea was that this would spark the immune system into working again. Hujar insisted that he would visit this doctor alone. He would take the train from Penn Station. At this point in his illness, Hujar could barely cross a room without falling. Still, it took three days of arguing before he consented to let David and Anita drive him there on a Saturday.
David wrote about this trip in Close to the Knives. He wrote to bear witness about the epidemic, but also to deal with what these moments brought up inside him. He got sick writing about Hujar’s illness. He came down with shingles. It had been so wrenching to admit to his anger—at Hujar who was imparting one last lesson to David. How not to die. Since David saw him more than anyone else did, he took the brunt of the rage. Still, his account of Hujar’s struggle is both harrowing and compassionate, one of the classic pieces of testimony to emerge from the AIDS crisis.
On the day of their trip to Long Island, David and Anita spent an hour and a half getting Hujar dressed and into the car. Before they’d even left Manhattan, Hujar began to complain angrily that there was a faster way to get there. Then he insisted he had to piss at a gas station where there was no bathroom, staggering off to urinate in a flower bed in what David saw as unfriendly territory. He refused to wear a seat belt. “Don’t touch me, it hurts.”
When they arrived at the doctor’s house, David dropped Hujar and Anita off in front and went to find parking. “In the distance,” David wrote, “I could see Peter staggering on the front lawn flailing about in rage. He staggered towards Anita then turned and teetered to the roadside.… By the time I reached Anita he was in the distance, a tiny speck of agitation with windmill arms. I asked her what had happened. ‘I don’t know, one minute he was complaining how long the ride took and when I said that maybe you did the best you could he went into a rage—he threatened to throw himself in front of the traffic. The saddest thing is that he’s too weak to throw a proper fit. He wanted to hit me but he didn’t have the strength.’ ”
They caught up with him, calmed him down, and got him into the doctor’s office. The waiting room was filled with men Hujar recognized from other waiting rooms, since the AIDS grapevine led PWAs from one supposed cure to the next. This actually cheered him up. David and Anita looked at each other in disbelief.
“Finally the brains behind the business called us into his personal office,” David wrote. “It looked like it had been decorated by Elvis: high lawn-green shag carpets, K-mart paintings and Woolworth lamps. Lots of official medical degrees with someone else’s name on them.… The doctor asked Hujar how he knew he had AIDS. ‘After all, you may not have it.’ ”
Hujar stumbled through a disjointed medical history, angrily refusing help from Anita. Then, while Hujar was in another room getting his typhoid shot, David asked the doctor to explain the theory behind this treatment. The doctor then admitted that he was really a research scientist and talked about the thymus gland, “wherever it is,” and drew a diagram of circles divided by a line: “Say ya got a hundred army men over here; that’s the T-cells.…”
On the way back to Manhattan, they stopped at a diner. David told Hujar about this unsettling encounter with the scientist. “He looked sad and tired,” David wrote. “He barely touched his food, staring out the window and saying, ‘America is such a beautiful country—don’t you think so?’ I was completely exhausted, emotionally and physically from the day, and looking out the window at the enormous collage of high-tension wires, blinking stop lights, shredded used-car lot banners, industrial tanks and masses of humanity zipping about in automobiles just depressed me. The food we had in front of us looked like it had been fried in an electric chair. And watching my best friend dying while eating a dead hamburger left me speechless. I couldn’t answer.”
Back at the loft, David and Anita asked Hujar if they could do anything, if he needed anything. When he responded with an angry “No,” they left. David learned later that Hujar had called Aletti almost immediately and said, “I don’t understand it. They just put me in bed and rushed out.”
Hujar had continued to discuss his will with Aletti, needling him over whether he’d have the time to be an executor, interrogating him about what he would call any future books about the work, and sometimes exploding in rage. After one phone call that ended with Hujar slamming down the phone, Aletti wrote him a note saying he just wanted to be his good friend now, not his executor. “I don’t want to be constantly on trial with him,” Aletti wrote in his journal. “I felt he was using the will as a wedge between us.”
On October 11, Hujar’s fifty-third birthday, Aletti came early to prepare for the party, “smothering my dread in determined cheer,” as he later wrote in Hujar’s obituary. “And while I set out paper plates and plastic cups, he started to talk about dying. He wondered how long his friends would grieve, how long we’d remember him. He wasn’t needling or fishing for sympathy, only clearing the air. We were gathering to celebrate his last birthday, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. For a few hours, though, he might allow us to cajole him into a mock-festive mood, and as guests arrived, he deflected their edgy merrymaking with gentle good humor. When his bed was surrounded by apprehensive friends, still tensed for the misstep that would send Peter into a tirade of denunciation, he looked up, smiled, and said, ‘Pretend you’re at a party.’ And for awhile, we were.”
On the next day, Columbus Day, Anita came to visit. “We started to talk about his dying,” she said. “I asked, ‘What would you like, and do you want me to write it down?’ That’s when he told me he wanted to be buried in the Catholic Church. He wanted to have just a shroud. He wanted to be buried in a plain box. He wanted a Mass. I wrote it down.”
Anita had brought a priest, part of a hospice team, to see Hujar early in the year. Hujar asked the priest more questions than the priest asked him. What was that life like? Did he have sex? Anita witnessed this encounter, the priest getting more and more embarrassed. He never came back.
“He embraced Catholicism at the end,” Schneider said. “But before, he was an atheist.” Hujar had long been interested in Siddha yoga, however, and went to retreats or at least classes at the SYDA Foundation on the rare occasions when he had money. He kept pictures around his bed of SYDA founder Swami Muktananda, along with photos of Kalu Rinpoche and the Tibetan Buddhist Karmapa, and two pictures of Pio of Pietrelcina, an Italian priest with the stigmata who was said to work miracles.
“He was grasping,” said Schneider. “He didn’t know what to do. He was lost.”
On October 22, David took Hujar to a neighborhood clinic to see a urologist. He’d been having pain while urinating and for the past day could not urinate at all, despite feeling an almost constant need to do so. They waited for several hours. When they finally met with the urologist, he exhibited what David saw as impatience, constantly cutting Hujar off as he tried to explain his problem. Finally he told Hujar he was going to insert a tube into his penis. Hujar asked if it would hurt. The doctor said there would be no pain, just discomfort.
In a letter of complaint David sent to the clinic, he wrote, “Peter’s reaction was of shock and much pain. I tried to calm him down while the doctor continued. At some point, Peter could not continue the exam—he sat up very upset and told the doctor to get away from him. The doctor reacted as if his life were being threatened.” Hujar barely had enough strength to crawl onto the examining table. But the doctor ordered him to leave and summoned a security guard.
David told the doctor he should have a little compassion; the guy just couldn’t take the pain. The doctor and the guard then ordered David to leave the examining room. (Hujar already had.) David declared that he would not go until he had both their names. The guard demanded to know David’s name and blocked him from leaving the room, ripping up the paper with his name and the doctor’s. “He then said he was calling the police and would have me arrested for harassing the doctor. He went on and began manufacturing false charges that he would give to the police when they arrived.” David began yelling out the door for help. Finally the guard stepped aside. David went to the waiting room, where Hujar sat. The guard came out and called the police.
David left with Hujar before the police arrived, and went home to write his letter.
One day Hujar sent Schneider into the darkroom to get something. Schneider walked in and stopped in his tracks.
“He had left the trays in the sink uncovered and all the chemicals had dried up and crystallized at the bottom,” Schneider said. “He had literally closed the door and not gone back in. I just stood there. It was a powerful, powerful image.”
Schneider had always known Hujar to be absolutely fastidious about the darkroom, but apparently he just suspended all work the day he got his diagnosis. “I just stood there. I was riveted,” said Schneider. “And all of sudden I hear, from his bed, ‘What’s taking so long?’ ”
Early in November, when Aletti came to visit him, Hujar said he thought he’d seen him less than any of his other friends. (Aletti disagreed but didn’t say so.) So, Hujar asked, “Are you afraid of my dying?” Aletti sat on Hujar’s bed, tears running down his face, telling him there would be a terrible feeling of loss. Then Hujar almost started to cry. Almost. He said that every time a friend visited, he wondered if he would ever see that person again.
Hujar brought them back down to earth by again invoking the will, the changes he might make. He thought maybe he should cut his mother out—she who had never once visited during his illness. He should put Aletti in as executor. He should say the negatives couldn’t be used for a hundred years.
Hujar had wavered on his decisions ever since making them, but he never did change the will. Koch said, “Peter assigned roles to people in his life, and I was the bourgeois brother. He left the estate to someone who he thought would make it successful.” Aletti had already been named alternate executor, and Hujar had told Koch that he must consult with Aletti if he was ever unsure about the quality of a print, because Aletti had such a good eye. He had decided that his mother and David and Koch would split the net proceeds, after debts were paid and Koch got the first fifteen thousand dollars for his work as executor. But according to Koch, David refused to accept any income from the estate. “He never said why. Just ‘I don’t want the money.’ ”
What dismayed many of Hujar’s friends—what Erdman called “the horror of his life at the end”—included a kind of internalized homophobia. Hujar told Erdman one day that if only he’d had money growing up, he might have been straight, because you needed money to take a girl out. Hujar had actually had one or two relationships with women. He just wasn’t straight. But clearly, when he wasn’t in a rage about having AIDS, he was pondering, “Why me?” or “Why us?”
“He thought there was a curse on all gay people,” Erdman said.
Schneider added, “He thought we were all going to die.”
This explains the rather cruel backhanded compliment he gave Koch the day he told him to “send little Madeline to college.” He also said, “You’re no good, but you’re the best I have.”
Hujar asked Fran Lebowitz to make his funeral arrangements. David called her and said, “Don’t go by yourself. I’ll come with you.”
Lebowitz had met David before Hujar became ill, but had not paid much attention to him at first. “That’s the first time I really thought that he was an unusual person, morally,” she said of his offer to help with the funeral. “David was an exceptional moral presence.”
Hujar wanted to be buried from Frank Campbell’s, an Upper East Side funeral home that had arranged burials for such luminaries as Judy Garland and Malcolm Forbes. “Peter had incredibly grand ideas,” Lebowitz said. “I didn’t even inquire there because I knew it was too expensive.”
Early in the epidemic, there was only one funeral home in all of New York City that would even take someone who had died of AIDS—Redden’s on West Fourteenth Street. Even after other funeral homes changed their policies, many people stayed loyal to Redden’s, and that’s where Lebowitz went with David.
Hujar wanted a pine box, and the only place they could get one was from an Orthodox Jewish coffin maker. Redden’s arranged this. “They couldn’t get one without a Star of David,” said Lebowitz. “I had a discussion about this with Peter. I became incredibly upset. David was very calm and much more able to deal with it, talk to the guy, and figure out how to get the Star of David off the coffin.”
An old friend of Hujar’s, Charles Baxter, moved into the loft when it became clear that Hujar could not be left alone for any significant amount of time. On Friday, November 13, Aletti came over to meet Baxter for dinner, only to have Baxter hand him a small note at the door: “Vince, I believe Peter has begun to die.” On Saturday, Aletti called and Hujar answered the phone, slurring words, saying he couldn’t talk and he was alone. Aletti, who lived across the street, could see from his window that actually David was there, sitting at the blue kitchen table. On Sunday, Aletti went over with fresh raspberries and found that Hujar was up, sitting at his desk with an inventory list of everything in the loft—who would get what. He needed help to get back to the bed. “Do you want the blue table?” he asked Aletti.
Hujar went back into Cabrini on November 16. Koch came to get him and watched as Hujar tottered around the loft, saying, “Goodbye table. Goodbye bed. Goodbye darkroom.” But this wasn’t supposed to be the end. He was going into the hospital for tests because he was still having trouble urinating and the slightest movement of an arm or leg could trigger nausea. He was supposed to be there two or three days.
The night before Hujar went to the hospital, David had his recurring dream about the lake. He was at the base of a mountain and spotted the dirt road that used to take him there. Years ago, he’d jumped in and swum into an interior cave where he found beautiful stalactites. “But it’s like a film in reverse where as I get older, I am getting further away,” he wrote. “Each successive dream seems to start at a point just a little further from the dirt road that leads to the lake.”
On the 17th, David woke up and wrote in his journal:
Everything about my life horrifies me at this moment, even the room the bed the heat of the pipe running down the wall the vague breeze never quite passing through the cheap curtains, the weight of blankets on me, the persistent need to piss, desire for a cigarette, Peter in the hospital, Tom sleeping in the other room, Peter’s friends and my feeling of not being understood by anyone anymore, and I think I should throw myself off a bridge or something, that I can’t deal with living the way I used to be able to do—the world is one large fear for me and I feel hot and cold simultaneously and I have no physical comfort in strength of body like when I was 21 and this makes me feel old and wasted like my body is falling apart but so slowly its all I can do to sit and watch it do so.
Five or six days later, he wrote in the journal what would become the beginning of his chapter on Hujar’s illness in Close to the Knives:
I’m sitting in his hospital room so high up here in the upper reaches of the building that when I walk the halls or sit in the room or wander into the waiting room to have a cigarette—it’s the gradual turn of the earth outside the windows, the far plains filled with buildings that have that look of fiction because so high up they flatten out one against the other … and leaning against the glass of the window in his room I see dizzily down into the next street and wonder what it is to fall such distances. I’m afraid he is dying.
Schneider and Erdman went to Hujar’s doctor to ask how long he had. Earlier that year, they’d booked a Thanksgiving trip to Santa Fe, which would be their first vacation from the lab in five years. Erdman asked the doctor if he thought they could go away for three days. Would Hujar be OK? “And the doctor said, ‘He’s not going to die this weekend. Don’t worry.’ And so we went.”
On Thanksgiving, on his way to the hospital, David ran into Ethyl Eichelberger. Ethyl had not been to visit during Hujar’s illness. Hujar and Ethyl had argued and fallen out. All Erdman could remember was that it was over something “so minor” but had something to do with “selling out.” As if either of them could. They had not communicated for at least a year, but when David saw Ethyl on the street, he insisted, “You have to come and see Peter. Now.”
Then it was Ethyl who first noticed the change, who said, “David … look at Peter.”
“And his death is now like it’s printed on celluloid on the backs of my eyes,” David wrote, “when I looked towards his face and his eyes moved slightly and I put up two fingers like rabbit ears behind the back of my head … and I flashed him the sign and then turned away embarrassed and moments later Ethyl said: ‘David … look at Peter.’ And we were all turned to the bed and his body was completely still and then there was a very strong and slow intake of breath and then stillness.”
David asked the other friends to leave the room. He asked Anita to guard the door, to keep out the hospital staff. Then with a Super 8 camera, he slowly made a sweep of Hujar’s body. Then he photographed the face, the hands, the feet of “this body of my friend on the bed this body of my brother my father my emotional link to the world.”
He took exactly twenty-three photographs, and that number was calculated. He would mark the envelope for these contact sheets as “23 photos of Peter, 23 genes in a chromosome, Room 1423.” He associated that number with the evolution of consciousness.
One of the photos David took immediately after Hujar’s death from AIDS. Untitled, 1988. Gelatin-silver print, 24½ × 30½ inches. (Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.)
Before David left the room, he thought he should say some words to his friend. If there was a limbo or a bardo, he was there now and might be afraid, might be confused, might need reassurance. “But nothing comes from my mouth,” David wrote. “This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can’t form words and maybe I’m the one who needs words, maybe I’m the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, ‘All I want is some sort of grace.’ ” Then David began to cry.
Hujar got his pine box and his shroud. He had also asked not to be embalmed. So the funeral happened just two days later, on Saturday, November 28, at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village. David wore a suit, which must have been Hujar’s. Tom had a fever of 105 and couldn’t be there. So David sat next to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. At some point, whoever was running this service told everyone to join hands. Said Greenfield-Sanders, “I was there holding David’s hand, and he was trembling.” The burial was at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
On Sunday—“the third day of his death,” David called it—he drove the twenty-five miles back to the cemetery to be alone with Hujar: “Looking at the fresh ground where he lies buried. I see white light, fix my eyes to the plowed earth and see a white powerful light like burning magnesium covering the soil, his body in a semicurled position surrounded by white light floating hovering maybe three feet from the ground. I try talking to him, wondering if he knows I’m there. He sees me, I know he sees me. He’s in the wind in the air all around me.”
That evening David went to the long-scheduled memorial for Keith Davis at St. Mark’s Church. There he ran into Kiki Smith and asked her to come back to Hujar’s loft with him. To dance. “I wanted to show Peter some joy, some celebration.… We turned on a few lights.… Each time I come in a little less of him is there.” They put on Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor and tried to waltz, but David couldn’t coordinate with Kiki’s movements. He felt his body had shut down. Kiki let go of him, turned off the lights, and began whirling through the space. David did the same, “whirling and jumping and driving through the darkness, the window curtains open with the rain roaring through the street … and for a moment everything went loose in my head and I was beaming some kind of joy.”
Schneider and Erdman were back at the lab on Monday, devastated. “We were just a mess,” Erdman said. David walked in. He had them sit down and then recounted the funeral—everything said, the rituals done. “He sort of acted it out,” Schneider said. “And it helped.”
Then he pulled out a photograph he’d printed for them in Hujar’s darkroom. It was a photo David had taken probably years earlier on one of his excursions with Hujar, when they’d drive to Caven Point or some other decrepit site to take pictures.
Hujar had imparted one of his lessons that day on how to live cheaply. Somewhere in this wreck of a building he’d found a pair of sunglasses. They were old, and they were fogged, but he put them on, telling David, “See. You don’t need to buy sunglasses. You can find them.”
And at that moment—so Peter Hujar—David had snapped his picture.
Schneider and Erdman stood there weeping.
Soon after, David disappeared. “I wouldn’t know where he was,” Tom said.
For part of that time, he was at the loft, sleeping in Hujar’s bed. Then one day, he came over to Tom’s place. “He was just morose and started to cry. He told me he had hooked up with some guy in an S-M relationship, someone he’d picked up in a bar. He was the masochist side of it, and he allowed the guy to abuse him for a while. He told me, ‘I was just a pure slave.’ He didn’t tell me all the details. He just felt so guilty for getting involved.”
David had found his bad father to be with, if briefly.
“I remember saying to him, ‘I’m glad you told me. I understand how crazy you were, but if it happens again, I don’t know what I’ll do,’ “ Tom said. “I guess we both thought we needed to be monogamous at this point. He was really upset about it. But I also could tell he was just lost. It was as if the whole world had come out from under him. And it was clear to me there wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t fill the shoes that were vacated by Peter’s death. And part of me resented that, but part of me understood it. It was painful to me that I couldn’t help him get over this thing.”
Tom gained perspective as time went on. In 1993, he said of David and Peter Hujar: “They were both more than and less than lovers. Peter was the one who saved him, who changed his life in a major positive way. They were kindred souls. Part of David was missing after Peter went.”