“In the Garden” was still up at P.P.O.W when David’s retrospective rolled into New York, headed for Exit Art, a large nonprofit space. Cofounders Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman had a special appreciation for artists who worked against the grain, against stereotypes, against aesthetic norms. They’d made it their mission to highlight the uncodified and the marginalized.
Ingberman called David “the perfect artist for Exit Art.” She had offered him a mid-career retrospective after his troubles began at Artists Space. Told that such a show was already in the works out in Illinois, Ingberman agreed to take “Tongues of Flame” when it toured.
Then she discovered that she was going to have trouble raising the money; David was now a targeted artist. Even colleagues in the nonprofit world were asking her, “How can you do this show? You’ll lose your funding!” She collected just a fraction of what she usually did—a donation from the Cowles Charitable Trust. Everyone else said no.
Colo and Ingberman didn’t really know David and were surprised to find that this artist with the aggressive sensibility was so reserved, almost shy. He came in one day with several shoe boxes and asked if he could put up some ephemera in a small room. They said they’d be delighted. So David went to work hanging flyers, notes, letters, doodles, personal photos, and posters that traced his history, while Colo installed the rest of the show. They got to talking, and Colo reported that David was installing “an archaeology of himself.”
This show opened on November 17, 1990. A week later, David was back in New Orleans for a vacation with Tom.
David’s physician, Dr. Robert Friedman, was waiting at the barbershop one day when he spotted the December 1990 Art in America with the name “David Wojnarowicz” on the cover.
The doctor said to himself, “Gee, I have a patient by that name. That’s not a common name.” Friedman read the piece, by Lucy Lippard, and realized then that his patient was a rather well-known artist. “I wasn’t even charging him. He had no health insurance, and he looked terrible, and I didn’t have the heart to ask him for money.” He brought the magazine back to his mother, who worked as his receptionist, and told her he didn’t know what to do about it.
David really liked Mrs. Friedman. She was always telling him to eat. Sometimes when he came in, she would run across the street to Christine’s, a Polish coffee shop, and buy him soup, then make him eat all of it in front of her. “I thought he was just a poor struggling East Village type,” said the doctor.
When David came in for his next appointment and began to walk out without paying, as usual, Mrs. Friedman pulled out the magazine and said, “Would you autograph this for us?”
“What?” David said, startled.
Dr. Friedman remembered: “My mother said, ‘David, you’ve been coming to see the doctor for like two years now and you’ve only paid a couple of times. Don’t you think you should do something for the doctor?’ I would never have had the chutzpah to say what my mother did. So David went down the block, and he came back and handed me a copy of The Sex Series. The whole series in a portfolio.” It was David’s artists’ proof. This was, of course, his preferred method of payment. (Coincidentally, that cover of Art in America featured his mixed-media piece Anatomy and Architecture of Desire, which he had given to Jean Foos in exchange for her work on the “Tongues of Flame” catalog.)
Dr. Friedman was so busy he did not take the time then to look through the portfolio. “So,” he said, “I see my mother and David looking at these big photos, which are highly sexual. And my mother, this Jewish lady from Rockaway, in her seventies, picks up the one of the forest with the circle insert [one man with an erection rimming another], and my mother—I’ve never forgotten this moment; it made me love my mother even more—my mother looked at the image and slaps her finger across the trees and says, ‘This is nature,’ and then she points at the insert and goes, ‘I guess that’s nature too.’ And David says, ‘You’re exactly right.’ “
Luis Frangella died of AIDS on December 7, 1990, at the age of forty-six.
On December 18, David requested that a piece of his be removed from a group show, “Art What Thou Eat: Images of Food in American Art,” opening that night at the New-York Historical Society. This exhibit of eighty food-related paintings and sculptures included work by such luminaries as Alice Neel, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein. What stuck in David’s craw was the presence of Mark Kostabi. “I’d never be in the same show with that bigot,” he told a reporter.
Once known for glib pronouncements like “paintings are doorways into collector’s homes,” Kostabi had been branded a vicious homophobe after the June 1989 Vanity Fair quoted him saying, “These museum curators, that are for the most part homosexual, have controlled the art world in the eighties. Now they’re all dying of AIDS, and although I think it’s sad, I know it’s for the better. Because homosexual men are not actively participating in the perpetuation of human life.”
Kostabi reacted to the public outcry by telling Newsday, “I feel terrible for saying something that was an unfair generalization based on a few specific experiences with gay curators and critics that left me very angry. The day of the interview I was in a very bad mood and took it out on a whole group and it was an insensitive and angry remark and I apologize to all who were offended.”
Ten days later, he retracted the retraction, telling the Post’s Page Six that he’d been pressured to apologize by Abbeville Press, which was about to publish Kostabi: The Early Years. “They’re scared to death. They made me write all these phony apologies,” he told Page Six, adding that he still thought the art world was dominated by homosexuals and “that’s why there’s so much bad art in the world.”
When Art Positive, an offshoot of ACT UP, organized in the summer of ’89 to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts, Kostabi had been the flashpoint.
“Art What Thou Eat” originated at the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard College, where it opened under the radar in September 1990. (David either didn’t know about it, or didn’t know Kostabi was included.) Bill Dobbs, an activist with Art Positive, took note of the show’s imminent arrival at the New-York Historical Society when an announcement ran with a photo of a Kostabi painting. Dobbs organized an opening-night protest with picketers from Art Positive as well as Queer Nation and ACT UP. David called Dobbs the day of the opening to say he would try to pull his piece, Tuna—one of the supermarket posters. He wasn’t sure he could, since he no longer owned it. Gracie Mansion did. But she agreed to David’s request, and the Historical Society museum director took Tuna off the wall during the opening.
That night, Kostabi left a long message on David’s answering machine. The core of it was this: “I just wanted to clarify matters and let you know that I’m not the person who I suspect you think that I am, and if you are specifically thinking about that quote in Vanity Fair, that was part of a performance art piece and the quote was actually a quote of what other people were saying. I was not quoting my feelings but things that I’ve heard other people say and it was used out of context, and I explained this about two years ago when it happened. And most of the people, like people at GLAAD and in the gay community—we talked it over and I had pretty much come to an understanding with everyone and I made numerous apologies. Apparently some people are still under the impression that I’m a ‘quote’ homophobe, or whatever, and I’m sure that will never die down with some people. And I sympathize with their and I presume your anger and I understand that. But I just wanted you to hear from me that that’s not the case, that I am exactly the opposite of what you think.”
Linda Weintraub, director of the Blum Art Institute and curator of the show, had Tuna rehung after the opening. She told a reporter that she had sympathy for David but that “his absence would have compromised the entire show.” In fact, the Historical Society had used Tuna as the press photo when they sent out the publicity. The final absurdity here was the way the catalog described Tuna, as “a comic-like portrait of Superman.” The figure painted on the supermarket tuna ad is clearly an outlaw in a green shirt, tying a red bandanna over his face. A small inset in that portrait shows a gun held by someone in a green shirt blowing the head off someone in a blue shirt.
In January, Weintraub sent David a letter: “I am anxious for you to know that the events that took place at the opening of the ‘Art What Thou Eat’ exhibition have not altered my regard for your work nor my respect for you as a spokesperson for your cause. My insistence that your work remain in the show is based on admiration.” She went on to offer him a chance to speak in a public forum at Bard on issues like “the rights of artists to control the sale, exhibition, and reproduction of their works of art after they leave the studio.”
“Art What Thou Eat” was up at the New-York Historical Society until March 22. On February 8, the museum director again removed Tuna, this time without consulting Weintraub.
On February 1, 1991, “Tongues of Flame” opened in Philadelphia at the Tyler School of Art’s Temple Gallery. Wendy Olsoff drove David there to do a reading, similar to what he’d done in Normal, with video running on several monitors.
“I have the worst sense of direction, but I thought, ‘I’ll just get us to Philly.’ I didn’t even have a map,” Olsoff said. “So David and I are talking on and on about dreams, about life, about death—and smoking so much there must have been smoke coming out the roof. And suddenly I realize we’re forty minutes past Philadelphia. I was going, ‘Oh my god, we have to find the school,’ and I realized, he did not care. I’ve thought about it since. For him, it was about the journey, the traveling. So I was in a panic and he was not in a panic, and he was not going to help navigate the route at all. I leaned out the window and got directions, and we were significantly late.
“There was a massive crowd waiting for him, because he was a legend at this point. So they had all the monitors set up and the microphones, and David starts getting really angry because the equipment wasn’t set up right. Everyone was a little scared of David. But they got it together, and once he started performing, everyone seemed to stop breathing. He had total control. I remember feeling bad, because he gave so much in the performance, and he was really sick.”
Early in February, David got a letter inviting him to appear in a Gap ad, for television, to be shot by Matthew Rolston. If he agreed, he would, talk on camera about an issue of importance to him. “The Gap will be encouraging subjects to use this important media access to affect positive social change,” said the invitation. Among the others the company had approached were Martin Scorsese, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, and I. M. Pei. The print campaign included Miles Davis, Spike Lee, and Joni Mitchell. The Gap would pay scale, which many subjects donated to charity. He would wear his own clothes plus one Gap item.
David walked over to the Schneider-Erdman Lab to tell Gary and John.
Erdman remembered asking him, “Are you going to do it?”
And he remembered David’s reply: “Are you kidding? That’s a sellout. That’s so commercial.”
David also received a letter that month from Amy Scholder in San Francisco, proposing that he do an artists’ book for a new imprint she was editing. Though she was still at City Lights, Scholder had taken on this project with Artspace, whose director, Anne Marie MacDonald, wanted to begin publishing books that paired a visual artist with a writer. They would be the same size and shape as the Golden Books for children. David would be first in the series, providing both words and visuals.
Scholder also invited him to participate in Out/Write, a gay and lesbian writers conference in San Francisco at the end of February 1991. He would be part of a panel titled “AIDS and the Social Function of Art.” To that end, he jotted a list of ideas in his journal: “disease on two legs,” “self-protective cliques even in the activist community,” “the need to have fantasies that don’t acknowledge AIDS issues,” and more. But he elaborated on only one of the points he wanted to make: “I’m not so much interested in creating literature as I am in trying to convey the pressure of what I’ve witnessed or experienced. Writing and rewriting until one achieves a literary form, a strict form, just bleeds the life from an experience. How do we talk, how do we think, not in novellas or paragraphs but in associations, in sometimes disjointed currents.” On February 24, he flew to San Francisco for the conference.
He did some journal writing there, none of it about Out/Write. He was too preoccupied with his depression: Two entries, “Guy on Polk Street” and “Kid on Market Street,” evoke the monologues of old, but David never spoke to those two for their stories, only noted their apparent suffering and their potentially imminent deaths.
Soon after his return to New York a week later, David received a four-page letter from a young writer he’d met at the conference. It began: “Dear David Wojnarowicz, First off, I want to tell you I think you’re one of the very few people in the world I could fall deeply in love with.” The young man said he now dreamt of David, felt he’d always known him, and spelled out an elaborate sexual fantasy about him. Though he was currently living with Dennis Cooper, he thought that relationship was over. He didn’t want to tell Cooper, however. He thought that, first, he and David should “just see what happens.”
David didn’t respond for almost two weeks. Then he wrote:
I haven’t answered right away because I’ve been pretty ill and also needed to think about your letter. I was feeling pretty sick at the conference and it got worse on the plane home. Your letter really surprised me. I mean, you don’t really know me at all and it’s a pretty intense letter to receive from someone I don’t know at all either. I don’t know what I represent to you but I really have none of the feelings you describe as having towards me.… The stuff you say about your relationship, I mean—that’s all normal stuff. The intensity at first is always wild because you can fill a person up with all associations and projections and myths and desires and when they and you reveal the subtle stuff underneath, it all becomes kind of mundane or “normal” and the intensity shifts. You need to accept that it is always like that and just put your energy into the subtle stuff and real communication; your fears, your desires, whatever. You should be exploring that with Dennis, otherwise you end up just repeating it over and over and over.… If you knew me at all, you would see that I really don’t want a love affair with anyone at this point in my life. I have a relationship that I’ve been involved with and all the issues you raise about yourself are things I’m dealing with with this guy. I remember when I had crushes on people in the past and the idea of it exhausts me. I’m dealing with all this illness around me and the illness I go through for periods of time so that things like love or stuff like that are issues that I don’t have the energy or desire to go through. Like I said, the guy I’m involved with to an extent is where I would put that energy if I wanted an intense relationship. Right now I actually prefer to be on my own for long periods so I can think and deal with issues like my past and my mortality.
Also, he couldn’t see going behind Cooper’s back. “I just don’t move that way.” He urged the young writer to work things out with Cooper.
He’d been selected again for the Whitney Biennial, this time with The Sex Series, He Kept Following Me, and When I Put My Hands on Your Body—the skeleton piece.
He sketched out an idea for a new painting. It would be like Something from Sleep II, with the figure drawn on maps dreaming at the bottom, but this time there would be even more things dangling over the bed—all David’s signature images, like the burning man, the worker carrying a deer, the burning house, the dung beetles, the locomotive, gears, nude men washing. He labeled it Dictionary of Good-Byes.
David would never make another painting, but wanted to finish what he could. In March, he and Ben Neill spent a few days in a Brooklyn studio recording ITSOFOMO with a fifteen-hundred-dollar grant from Art Matters. The cover would use a detail from Fear of Evolution, the monkey pulling a globe in a wheelbarrow.
His activity gets harder to track here. Most of the journal entries from the beginning of 1991 are undated. One says: “ ‘Like a marble rolling down a hill’—something heard on TV.” David had this fatalism about him. His doctor thought that part of him wanted to keep fighting but part of him was resigned to dying. In another journal passage, David wrote down one of the politically correct tropes of that time: “AIDS is not about death. It is about people living with AIDS.” His pronouncement on that: “Bullshit.… I demand that we don’t slip into denial about Death as an aspect of AIDS.”
Seven Miles a Second, 1993. Ink on paper. Title page (p. 39) of the third section of the graphic novel by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook. This drawing is an accurate representation of David at home.
He visited his friend Phil Zwickler in the hospital. Since Zwickler was asleep much of the time, David drew a picture of him hooked up to an IV with a caption: “He had dementia. One time he woke up laughing. What’s funny, I asked. He mumbled: the story in the paper. I picked up a newspaper from the floor. On page 2 the headline said: WOMAN TRIES TO STOP FIGHT BETWEEN TWO 5000 POUND ELEPHANTS. No that’s not it, he said, and fell asleep.”
David was like a turtle pulled into his shell. He observed but mostly kept people at bay. Even as he wrote and drew to bear witness to the epidemic, he faced, once again, the core issue in his life: How much could he reveal about himself? He found it difficult to communicate what he was feeling even to those closest to him, like Tom. Someone had arranged for David to see a doctor in Boston for some experimental treatment, and Tom kept asking, “Do you want me to go with you?” Tom was more than willing to do that, but David always said no and wouldn’t even say when he was going. Then on April 8, he called Tom at work. Tom took his call, as he always did, though he was in the middle of a meeting with several state officials. David said to him, “I’m leaving for Boston in an hour.” Tom was shocked—and angry—and he couldn’t stop his meeting to have a conversation, so he said, “Good luck.”
David then wrote in his journal that he’d called “a friend”—Tom—who’d responded as if David was going “for an overnight vacation.” He added, “I’m speechless.” David stayed in Boston just the one night. The drug reaction lasted forty-eight hours. It made him nauseated and wobbly. He had a new pain beneath his rib cage, right hand side. But there was more than physical discomfort now. His fear of rejection and his refusal to let anyone comfort him was making him very miserable. “My eyes hurt when I cry so I can’t even fucking let it out,” he wrote in the journal.
He decided against continuing with the experimental treatment. He began to have unexplained fevers, night sweats, profound weakness. He was getting to that point where he could give all his T-cells names. But then he would rouse himself. He was very determined to finish a couple of projects, like the artists book he titled Memories That Smell like Gasoline.
The book would be one last act of transgression. He was thinking about sex, the mystery and power of it, the adventures he’d had. The visual element in Memories That Smell like Gasoline would be his black and gray watercolors of sexual encounters set in porn theaters—delicate renditions of hard-core scenes—along with ink drawings that illustrated moments from his own sexual history. He included the drawing made at Zwickler’s bedside. The four stories were all about anonymous sex—the sweet pleasures of cruising but also the dangers. There’s a constant sense in these texts of at least latent violence, which sometimes turns real and potentially deadly.
The title story is about the night he was in the lobby of a movie theater and suddenly saw a man who’d raped him when he was a teenager. David had been on one of those jaunts out of the city that he used to take from Port Authority, riding a bus into New Jersey to some body of water where he’d walk in fully clothed and float, then hitch a ride back. A man in a pickup truck stopped for him, drove to a remote location, overpowered him, fucked him. David remembered that to endure the rape he had tried, unsuccessfully, to imagine that the guy was sexy or gentle. David thought he might die that night, and when he saw the man at the theater, he shrank in his own mind to boyhood-size and went and hid in a bathroom stall.
He had been a victim of sexual violence and now he was facing death from a sexually transmitted disease—yet for David, holding on to sex was a way of holding on to life, and he was trying to understand the contradictions.
He wrote about sex in the pre-AIDS world—like the time he hooked up with a truck driver while he was on the road. He also included the story, from the 1980 journal, about the night he met a deaf and mute man who followed him into the West Fourth Street subway station and, on the empty mezzanine between the Eighth Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines, began to simultaneously blow him and rob him. David escaped and ran to the lower platform, where he just managed to leap into an F train as the doors closed, and then found himself surrounded by sleeping winos.
He wanted to analyze what he’d seen in this guy and in the other violent, unpredictable men he sometimes found himself attracted to. “It’s something about violence as a distancing tool to break down the organized world. It’s the weird freedom in his failure to recognize the manufactured code of rules. The violence that floats like static electricity that completely annihilates the possibility of future or security; I’m attracted to living like that,” he wrote in this piece, titled “Doing Time in a Disposable Body.” David had never been violent with anyone, yet he radiated that impulse in his frightening rages. He knew so much now about how he used his anger in order to survive. Increasingly he had found aesthetic solutions to his early experiences with violence. That was a way to be set free.
The concluding story here, “Spiral,” is the last piece David ever wrote. Much of it is about AIDS, hospital visits to the latest dying friend, his reaction to some porn palace where no one’s using a condom, and, at the end, a poetic evocation of fading away: “I am growing tired. I am waving to you from here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.”
He saw his impending death, the secret theme of Memories, as the logical outcome of a society that did not value him, did not protect him—and never had.
David called me on April 10 to say that in five days he was going to start driving across the country to do readings from Close to the Knives, which would reach bookstores that month. “I carry a whole blanket of fears in my psychology,” he told me, “and I think this trip could be a big breakthrough for me.” He was going to take a typewriter and a sketchpad and try to relax. Then when he got back at the end of May, he planned to start another experimental drug trial in Boston. In the journal, though, he wrote that he was probably crazy not to cancel this trip. He’d felt nauseated all week.
On April 12, David underwent a bone marrow biopsy to test for lymphoma. They took marrow from his hip, and the next day he was still in pain, “kicked by a tiny mule,” he said when he wrote about it in the journal. He could calm himself by thinking, “I’m here. This is the chair, the bed, the shelf …” The cross-country trip was on hold.
“I’ve been depressed for years and tears since Peter died and Tom’s diagnosis and my own diagnosis,” he wrote in the journal. “When I was younger I could frame out a sense of possibility or hope, abstract as it was, given my life felt like shit. I’ve lost that ability. Too much surrounds me in terms of fears … the recent loss of mobility where I am too terrified to go long distances for fear of death or illness in unfamiliar environs. Knowing I’ve been depressed, realizing the extent recently, makes it all more confusing because I don’t know, I can’t separate what in my fatigue and exhaustion and illness is from depression, what is from disease. One feeds on another until I want to scream.”
David’s self-imposed isolation was the opposite of what he needed. He thrived on interacting with people. It’s why he collaborated so much. But he’d decided that no one could comprehend what he was going through, so he kept to himself, which made him more depressed, which made him feel more isolated.
The big list of complaints he eventually made, the one in which he broke down what had happened with Marion Scemama, would also include the friends who were now telling him things like “You look good, you’re a survivor.” He added a complaint about his boyfriend: “With Tom, I can’t verbalize my illness or dying—he can’t handle it. I get so lonely in this illness that I wish I could go to bed and die but I’m afraid to take my own life right now.”
The observation about Tom would prove to be quite unfounded, but during this period David wouldn’t even tell him if he had a fever. As a rule, he and Tom spoke on the phone every day if they didn’t see each other. But one night, David told him, “I feel more alone when you call than when you don’t call.”
Recalling how irritable and uncommunicative David was about his illness at this point, Tom said, “I think he assumed that people should be able to intuit how to deal with him. As much as I would try to figure out what to do, it was really hard. Clearly something was going on emotionally with him very, very deeply, but you couldn’t touch it. I just couldn’t get there. So that comment came out of that kind of struggle. But it really hurt. I felt so bad when he said that. I didn’t know what to do.”
David wrote later in his journal:
I don’t know why I feel this, but I do and I have to say it. I can’t control myself. Nobody can touch what’s going on inside me, so maybe that’s the bottom line problem. I have to get used to it, get used to fevers periodically. Sore throat strep throat I’m just beginning to get. Took a little mirror to look at my throat, bent over a lamp and found my mouth full of fungus again. What do I do? [Tom] slammed the phone down and I don’t blame him because it was brutally clear what I said but I can’t pretend it feels different. When he calls lately it’s usually at the end of the day to say goodnight and my head is so filled with fear and darkness it’s almost an insult. Everything is scary and I feel shook with the reality of the situation. I AM DYING SLOWLY. CHANCES DON’T LOOK TOO GOOD.
Marion had called David sometime in March. They began speaking again, and the connection intensified in April. David’s phone bill showed fifteen calls to Paris between April 6 and the beginning of May. One would call, and after they talked awhile, they’d hang up and the other would call back, so they could share the cost. One night they talked for four hours.
David told her about wanting to do a book tour, but by the end of April, he’d narrowed that down to one stop: San Francisco. He also wanted to revisit his favorite spots in the Southwest. He asked Marion to come with him. “This will be my last trip,” he told her more than once. “My last trip.”
“I was kind of scared to do it,” she said. “I knew how hard it would be. He was sick and I didn’t know if I would handle it, but at the same time, I didn’t think I could say no.”
During one of their phone calls, he told her, “I have a list of things to discuss with you before we decide to do this.”
Marion thought, how American! “But in fact it was great,” she said, “because we had to define what kind of relationship we had, what kind of relationship we didn’t want to have anymore, and what kind of relationship we dreamed of having during this trip. Then I said, ‘I should have my list, because you’re hard to deal with too.’ But I didn’t prepare a list. I may have asked about two or three things, but the main thing I said was, ‘I want you to swear, really swear, that whatever happens during this trip, you will never reject me the way you did before. I went through a strong depression. It has been too hard for me.’ … And he laughed and said, ‘No, no, no, I promise.’ “
They planned to fly to Albuquerque and rent a car. Marion came to New York several days beforehand and helped David get ready—doing errands, the legwork. Every day when six o’clock came around, though, he would ask her to leave the loft because Tom was coming over. Marion didn’t think this was odd. David was about to leave town for three weeks, so of course he’d want to spend time with Tom. Then one day, Tom was on his way over and she was still there. “I didn’t understand why David was so nervous,” she said, “but I left.” She went to see someone in the neighborhood and came back along Second Avenue just as Tom and David were leaving the building. “I was going to walk over to them and say hello to Tom,” she said. “David saw me, and I could see him freaking out.” He signaled at her to walk away. Then he and Tom crossed the street. “That was an image I kept in my mind.”
Tom knew that David was traveling with Marion but he thought they were meeting in New Mexico. He did not know that Marion was in New York. Nor did David tell Tom that this was going to be his “last trip.”
Phil Zwickler died of AIDS on May 7, 1991, at the age of thirty-six.
On May 8, David and Marion arrived in Albuquerque. They rented a car and drove to Monument Valley, which was probably their first stop. But then they headed for Las Vegas. According to Marion, there was a show there that David wanted to see. It had been running for ten years, or maybe twenty or thirty. People had played the same roles for decades. That was all she could remember of David’s description. As they drove, David joked that maybe they should get married. In Las Vegas, it only took five minutes. What would François think, he asked. Marion wondered what Tom would think.
She said that she’d actually broached the idea of marriage earlier, maybe in ’89. She couldn’t remember the date, but they’d written some letters about it. After his diagnosis, he worried about how he would afford health care, since he had no insurance. She told him that if they married, he would be able to get free health care in France. They fantasized further. They’d live in a loft together. They’d generate income by making T-shirts. Tom would move in too, and Marion would get him a job as a cook—she knew people. “We lived in this dream for two weeks, three weeks,” she said, “but if he had asked me, I would have done it. I think it made him feel better to know that there was this possibility.”
So they were approaching Las Vegas, she said, “with odd but sweet feelings for each other,” and they stopped for gas on the edge of town. They were within sight of the glitz and the kitsch when they saw a girl walk out of a convenience store with a big frozen drink that was pink and green or blue—something so aggressively artificial it seemed the symbol of the city. David asked her if she really wanted to go into Las Vegas.
She said, it’s up to you.
He said, let’s drive to Death Valley.
She thought maybe if they’d gone into Las Vegas they would have gotten married, and that would have been a mess, “but there was this kind of romanticism sometime between him and me, like we could go together forever.”
Certainly when they worked together, they’d been capable of an almost uncanny rapport. But the perceptions they had on this trip often seemed to originate on two different planets.
When David wrote in his journal about these first days on the road, he said nothing about Las Vegas, marriage, or even Marion:
I’m in a constant flux of anxieties about my body and its exhaustion and strange waves of illness. I feel like my brain and my body are separated and my brain refuses to acknowledge that my body wants to shut down or throw up or burn with fever. Sometimes it hits just a few hours after waking—if I’m lucky it waits until late afternoon or evening. I hate it. And I push myself to keep moving or else consign myself to the bed in surrender which depresses me, makes me angry, makes everything dark until I wish for death to relieve me. I get tense and suddenly everything is too much. I think I’ll break down if even one more thing confronts me. Even a simple choice makes me feel like I want to scream and disappear.
I know I need to adjust and accept my body and its levels of energy but it complicates everything. My refusal to accept is the struggle. I feel extremely alone in all this as if confronted with no choice when I should have a choice. I’m too young for this yet I’m feeling old from all the deaths. Phil died a few days ago on the 7th of May. I couldn’t feel anything but maybe a little relief for him that it was over. That lasted until evening of the 8th. Then I got scared and sad. Now I can’t believe all the death I’ve seen. It’s so outrageous, it’s like a long slow fiction that overtakes what you come to know as “life.” It’s like waking up one morning to see that the sky has disappeared and it never comes back no matter how patiently you wait.
When they drove into Death Valley, they stopped the car to watch a beautiful sunset. They walked a ways and wrote in the sand, “David and Marion Death Valley May 1991.” They started speaking about how it would be nice for David to die there. They could place beautiful fabric on the sand and light candles and it would be dusk. Marion would be with him. And Tom. To that, David said, “We’d have to put a curtain up between you.”
Marion said, “What are you talking about?”
David told her, “Tom never wanted to share my friends with me, in any way. He doesn’t understand my relationship with you.”
Of course, David did not really want Tom to know his friends. Marion was not aware of this, since she had met Tom easily enough. So had Patrick. Conveniently, both lived far away. Among David’s New York friends, Judy Glantzman knew of Tom’s existence but did not socialize with him. The only friends of David’s who did so were Gary Schneider and John Erdman. They had even accompanied Tom and David on one of their trips to New Orleans.
More typical was Norman Frisch, who had no idea that David had a boyfriend until sometime in 1991. “He seemed to be keeping Tom in a corner of his life that only he entered,” Frisch said. “David was very paranoid about people plotting. I’m talking about his friends. He just didn’t want anyone talking about him or planning anything for or about him that wasn’t in his direct control and that he wasn’t hearing and seeing. That was part of why he was so insistent on keeping these worlds of people apart from one another.”
David writing in his journal on the last trip. (Photograph by Marion Scemama)
And that evening in Death Valley, Marion began to sense this. She asked David if he wanted her and Tom to fight. “I wanted to let David understand that maybe he did things wrong,” she said. “Maybe he manipulated my relationship with him to get Tom jealous.”
Then David told her that Tom did not know they were traveling together, that that was why he’d waved her away on Second Avenue. This was not true. (Before David left town, Tom told him, “Push her off a mesa for me.”) But Marion believed David, believed Tom didn’t know, and she was upset that Tom didn’t know.
She thought that now Tom would hate her—because she was doing the “last trip” and he was not. But the real issue between them was probably not resolvable. “Maybe I was jealous of the intensity of their connection,” Tom said. “But mostly, I felt that she wanted to swallow him. Just essentially capture him in some way.”
“I almost had tears,” Marion said. “I realized I would never be next to David when he died. I thought of all these things we were supposed to do together.” According to Marion, David had asked her to photograph him just after he died, the way he’d photographed Hujar. Now she knew that would be impossible. “So I start getting nasty at David, teasing him, and the charm was finished. That day the charm was finished.”
David sent a postcard to Judy Glantzman the day they got to Death Valley, however, telling her, “Marion has been a pleasure to be with. I’m the one I feel must be difficult when I don’t feel well.” They spent five days in Death Valley, and it isn’t really clear when things started to go wrong.
David loved the desert, loved contemplating the emptiness and driving through it at speeds that let him fantasize about becoming airborne. He did not mention Marion in the journal until they were about a week into the trip, so this may have been where the tension began. She had gone for a walk in the desert and came back with a story about a black bird that came walking up, circled her, and then flew away. David remarked that “maybe it thought you were carrion.” Marion did not know that word, and when David explained, she was irritated. According to Marion, they did not have a fight but she did not appreciate the joke he was making. As she put it, “Sometimes I don’t have humor.”
“She gets on my nerves sometimes,” he wrote in the journal, “but then again, I don’t do well being with anybody these days for too much time. I know she wants it to be different between me and her. I know. But that’s the breaks, that’s how it is in my body and mind, months and months of isolation don’t break so easy.… The silence and the tension is rising really it’s the music underneath that silence and its stirring the violence I carry … fueling whatever potential I have for being a killer … and I’m so tempted does she know I’m so tempted to turn the wheel, its just the turn of a wheel, its just a turn of the wrist and we will fly we will burn away we will fall away we will jet away a killer in a jet plane with four wheels and a windshield oh life is so free in America.”
They got to San Francisco on May 17. David’s old friend Philip Zimmerman, who knew Marion from the East Village days, came to hear him read. He remembered that during this two-day visit “David and Marion were bickering and complaining about each other. One would take me aside and say terrible things and then the other would do the same.”
David introduced Zimmerman and Marion to Amy Scholder. He read at the gay bookstore A Different Light, and afterward the four of them walked to City Hall to join the AIDS Candlelight Memorial and Mobilization. Marion walked with Zimmerman and watched as David and Amy engaged in intense conversation all the way there. David wrote in his journal that he had felt an “instant deep connection” with Amy. He thought she was beautiful, sexy, and smart and “if she were a guy I’d maybe marry her.” (He said none of this to Amy.) But the next morning, he resented it when Marion called Amy and invited her to join them for breakfast before they left town. “Then she started torturing me with the possibility of taking pictures of Amy and me,” he complained. He hated being photographed in public. Marion had also taken pictures the morning before and he’d asked her to stop and she hadn’t. This time she said she’d photograph only Amy, but David was tense all through breakfast.
During one of the rare moments when Amy was alone with David, she said, “Oh, Marion’s great,” and he said, “She’s driving me crazy.”
As he and Marion drove out of town, headed back to Death Valley, David recounted an incident at a San Francisco porn theater. He’d gone there to jerk off, something he hadn’t done in months. A guy sat next to him and put his hands all over him and then tried to suck his dick while David rebuffed him. So David told Marion all the intimate physical details, all the complicated things that had been going through his mind. He felt he had laid himself bare, more than usual. That evening as they drove through Bakersfield looking for a place to eat, she began to tell him about a sexual encounter she’d had in Marrakech when she was traveling with a girlfriend. She’d met two French guys, was attracted to one of them, and ended up having sex with both of them. But she stopped the story at “a point of intimate detail,” as David put it. She wouldn’t go any further. To David, this was betrayal. “I told her I would never again talk about intimate details of certain experiences if she couldn’t tell me about hers. I felt emotional in this. Hurt. I wanted her to hear me. It was a flurry of emotions and it swept into the moving car.” They found a steak house with fake Western decor. “She said the fact I pushed her to speak of the details made her suddenly freeze and unable to remember or that she needed time or something.”
“I was kidding,” Marion remembered. “I was playing like a little girl who didn’t know what to say, and then all of a sudden he just blew out, yelling at me, ‘How dare you.’ Then I started to really freak out. It paralyzed me because then we were back to something heavy. And so I couldn’t speak anymore. We went to a kind of pub. It was dark and we had a difficult dinner. We couldn’t speak to each other. We tried to make it work, but something was broken.”
David told his journal that it wasn’t her unwillingness to share intimate details that got to him; it was the “trust broken.” He wrote, “My emotional reaction was betrayal and regret, stupid as that may look at a later date. I felt like I was a stranger or she was a stranger in that moment. It could be a child’s thoughts, it could be. But it’s there and I felt a door closing between us.”
They were at a Days Inn in Bakersfield. They were at a stalemate. David asked Marion if she could let it go and she said no. As long as this heaviness was in the air, he said, he didn’t want to go on to Death Valley, where the hotel was expensive. Spending extra money to be miserable—no. They could just head back to New Mexico. She said she could take the bus to Albuquerque and wanted him to help her plan this. He decided, “I don’t have the energy to plan her trip, to plan the disintegration of this one.… I feel like I’m standing in the distance watching this accelerate and grow and implode and yet it seems stupid, what it’s all based on.”
He called the front desk and said they were staying another day. Then he drove off and left her at the Days Inn. He thought she should decide if she really wanted to split, and he didn’t want to sit in the room and listen to her make plans.
He and Marion had not seen each other in nearly two years. “When she was coming with me, all my thoughts were based in old memories of the exciting times, the intense communications that ran deep between us,” he wrote in the journal. “Years ago we were almost inseparable. Others were jealous of us because there was a great sense of reality between two people that outlined something of the soul, previous travelers who recognize each other in the cloak of strangers. Two strangers who know each other intimately and instantly upon meeting. Maybe that’s why it breaks so powerfully. But this time has been different. I can recognize what I loved in her in the past but something has changed.” He decided that he was the one who had changed. And it had to do with “that thing, that form, that location” that had grown inside him through all the loss he’d experienced, beginning with Hujar’s death. “I kept waiting for the switch to be thrown, the close-up recognition that she and I had resumed what we dropped two years ago. It never came.”
Meanwhile, back at the motel, Marion wrote in her diary, made some Polaroids, and cried. She called her sister and Sylvère Lotringer. She called the bus station. She would return to San Francisco, she thought. So she called Amy Scholder and asked if she could stay with her.
Amy said no, reasoning, “I didn’t want to get in the middle of their shit. It was impossible. Then David called me. I told him that Marion had called, and he was furious.” This would go onto David’s final complaint list—the way Marion would call his friends, even his sister, to get information about him or somehow insinuate herself. He hated it.
Marion also called Philip Zimmerman. “She was pumping me for information about David,” he said. “It would have been comical if there wasn’t such weird desperation behind it.”
Meanwhile, David called Tom to complain.
“I’m sitting in a restaurant and eating alone and writing and the world goes on around me,” David wrote. “The Bakersfield world. For a moment I wanted to tell her, Don’t go. On one level, I’d rather finish the trip, on another level, I’d rather be alone. I don’t have a strong feeling of being able to retrieve enough of a connection to her to make the return trip have lovely meaning. Something has shut down, maybe out of exhaustion, maybe out of despair, maybe I need a catastrophe or explosion. This is not clear at all. I just want it somehow to stop.”
Marion said, “He wouldn’t help me to leave, but at the same time he wouldn’t do anything to make things better. On the second day I thought that we couldn’t keep on like this. It was too hard for me, and if I would stop the trip, it would be like a failure. I would feel so bad to leave him and to go back to France. So when he came back in the late afternoon, I had all these Polaroids around me that I did in the hotel room. I was posing, and in one of the Polaroids I was lying on the bed with Close to the Knives on my chest, as if I were reading and thinking about the book—a stupid photo in a way. So when David walked in the room, I thought, I’m going to act like everything is all right. So I said to David, ‘Look at the photos I took.’ And when he saw these photos of me laying on the bed with his book on my chest, he started laughing.” Of these fights that started so unexpectedly and irrationally, she said, “After a while we would laugh to make things relieved, because it was too heavy for both of us to handle. And that’s what happened. From one minute to another we became friends again.”
He wanted to drive through the emptiest parts of the earth. So they returned to Death Valley for a couple of days.
On one of them, they drove out to a canyon and parked. Marion, who shared David’s love for toy animals, had a plastic frog, snake, and alligator and said she was going to photograph some animal scenes among the rocks. David told her, “Go by yourself. I’m staying here.” She thought he wasn’t doing well and wanted to be alone. She left him and walked into the canyon, where she did some self-portraits and staged animal shots. After about a half hour, she went back to the car and found that David had tilted the seat back as far as it would go. He lay there completely pale, “like somebody who was really suffering,” she said, “like somebody not anymore of this world.”
She went up and took his hand, saying, “Come back, David, come back. Don’t worry.”
“I felt that something was going wrong,” she said, “that he was going away, in his mind and in his body. Like he wasn’t there. So I started caressing him and talking to him, and then he came back. I don’t know where he had been, but he had been somewhere I couldn’t reach. And little by little his face started getting color again, and then I asked him, ‘What happened, David?’ And he said, ‘It’s nothing—don’t worry,’ and then three minutes later he was laughing.”
They drove the back roads. They drove through Indian reservations, where David always felt like an interloper. But he couldn’t stand the tourist areas. By May 24, they were in Flagstaff and the next day Gallup. It was there that David said to Marion, “There’s a photo I want you to take.”
Untitled, 1993. Gelatin-silver print, 28½ × 28½ inches. David selected this image from the series of photos taken that day, but it was printed posthumously. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)
He drove them north to Chaco Canyon. He had been there before and knew exactly where he wanted to stage this. “We’re going to dig a hole,” he told her, “and I’m going to lie down.”
They began digging without saying a word, a hole for his upper body and a bit for the legs. They used their hands. The dirt was loose and dry. He lay down and closed his eyes. Marion put dirt around his face till it was halfway up his cheeks and then stood over him, photographing his half-buried face first with his camera and then with hers.
“We walked back to the car, and we sat without saying a word,” she said. “He didn’t turn the car on. We stayed like this a few minutes, and then we held hands.”
Marion decided that this project was a last gesture from him because she would not be able to photograph him at his death. But David never said that. Certainly, he had orchestrated all of his last work very carefully.
They always shared a motel room, with twin beds, and on the last night, David handed a postcard of a hairy scorpion across to her. On the back, he’d written, “Dear Marion, Bruja, Coyote Girl, Despite the rough spots it was a good voyage.… I hope I’m healthy enough to see Morocco with you next year. We’ll see. Hope you follow your heart and mind and make the films you carry in your body and write the books I know you can write. France would never be the same. Adios. Love, David.”
He had drawn some little spectacles on the scorpion. David and Marion both wore glasses. “I asked him if it was me or him, and he didn’t answer,” said Marion. “He laughed.”
David returned to New York in time to attend Phil Zwickler’s memorial on what would have been his friend’s thirty-seventh birthday—June 1, 1991. That night he dreamt that he called Zwickler’s number. And Zwickler answered! David was amazed, and afraid to mention death, as if that would make him disappear again. Suddenly he and Zwickler were seated at a table together. David asked, “How was it?” Meaning death. Zwickler would only look at him but seemed to be suggesting that it wasn’t so bad. “The small distance between us was charged with emotion,” David wrote. “I was trying to understand everything in the world at once. If he died and was now back physically and able to talk to me, then death was a process that was one of transition or travel. I was just so relieved to see him alive, or at least physical and communicating. I started weeping and then so did he. We cried this short intense clear emotion. It felt like what I think grace is.”
